Gradle Benchmark

The fantastic gradle-profiler tool lets us benchmark different Gradle commands and fine-tune Gradle.

Builds

We often refer to "build times" as how long it takes for us to compile the project. However, this can vary a lot based on different factors.

• Clean build or incremental build?
• Gradle daemon enabled?
  • Gradle daemon warmed up?
  • How warm is it?
• Build cache enabled?
• Configuration cache enabled?
• Multi-module project?
  • What module or modules have changes?
  • Are those changes impacting other modules?
• Are we changing resource files that need to be processed?
• Are there other programs using computer resources as well?

There are many things that can cause builds to vary drastically. So instead of thinking of a single concept of "build times", I like to group these up into build scenarios. Then run benchmarks on these scenarios to get a good idea of average times. This then allows tweaking and verifying through a more repeatable system.

Running

To run the benchmark for builds we can execute the benchmark_builds.sh file. This sources scenarios from build-scenarios.txt. Try to avoid running other programs that can use up a lot of resources.