methods to enhance the speed of your Gradle build?

2 years ago

Liam

3 minutes

In this tutorial, we will explore actions that can be taken using the Gradle build to enhance the speed of the building process.

Accelerate the build process of your Android Gradle.

As the size of our Android Studio project grows, the speed of the gradle build becomes crucial. Even for the simplest project, the gradle speed is quite slow. However, each project has its own complexity and uniqueness, which results in different build speeds. Nonetheless, one common factor regarding build speeds is that it consumes our valuable time, ultimately affecting our productivity. Implementing a few simple techniques can assist in saving those additional seconds per build, significantly improving productivity.

Try to limit your use of modules. In many cases, we need to modify a library to fit our specific requirements. However, using a module takes four times longer than using a jar or aar dependency because the module needs to be built from scratch every time.

Enable offline work for Gradle by going to Preferences-> Build, Execution, Deployment-> Build Tools-> Gradle. This prevents Gradle from accessing the network during the build process and forces it to resolve dependencies from the cache. Keep in mind that this only works if all the dependencies have been downloaded and stored in the cache. If you need to modify or add a new dependency, you will need to disable this option or the build will fail.

Open the gradle.properties file in the root of your project and add the following lines of code:

org.gradle.daemon=true – This enables the Gradle daemon, a background process that consumes extra memory during builds.

org.gradle.parallel=true – Enabling this allows for compilation of multiple modules simultaneously and provides additional benefits such as reusing configuration for unchanged projects, project-level up-to-date checks, and using pre-built artifacts instead of building dependent projects.

Adding the following line of code also helps speed up the build process:

org.gradle.configureondemand=true – This property allows Gradle to configure modules only when necessary.

Another important property is:
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
This line allows Java compilers to have up to 2GB of available memory (2048 MB). It should only be used if you have more than 2GB of available memory. The gradle.properties file should look like this:

Avoid using dynamic dependencies, such as “compile ‘com.google.maps.android:android-maps-utils:0.4+'”. These dynamic dependencies slow down the build process as they constantly search for the latest builds. To improve performance, specify a fixed version instead.

Only use the dependencies that you actually need. Instead of importing “compile ‘com.google.android.gms:play-services:8.4.0′”, import only the specific dependency you require, such as “compile ‘com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:8.4.0′”.

The utilization of such adjustments in our project ultimately leads to significant time savings. I trust that these suggestions for enhancing your project’s build time using gradle will be beneficial.