Tip to speed up the Android Studio project build compilation process

Android Studio builds Android projects with the default Gradle property settings. If you find the build process taking a long time and your computer has adequate memory, it is possible to tweak the settings to allocate more memory to the build process to reduce the compilation time.

In Android Studio, open up the top level gradle.properties file to change the settings, as shown below.


In the editor, locate the commented line with the string "org.gradle.jvmargs", and make a copy of it directly underneath; then remove the # character to un-comment it.

An example of an edited gradle.properties file is shown below.

# Project-wide Gradle settings.

# IDE (e.g. Android Studio) users:
# Gradle settings configured through the IDE *will override*
# any settings specified in this file.

# For more details on how to configure your build environment visit
# http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/build_environment.html

# Specifies the JVM arguments used for the daemon process.
# The setting is particularly useful for tweaking memory settings.
# Default value: -Xmx10248m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m
# org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

# When configured, Gradle will run in incubating parallel mode.
# This option should only be used with decoupled projects. More details, visit
# http://www.gradle.org/docs/current/userguide/multi_project_builds.html#sec:decoupled_projects
# org.gradle.parallel=true

Now, the build process should complete faster.