How to speed up Android Studio compilation process

Question

Latest update: Check out Android Studio 2.0 (preview) Instant Run it is awesome!!!!

I have found some tips (Building and running app via Gradle and Android Studio is slower than via Eclipse) to speed up the compilation process of Android Studio (Gradle) but I still think it is way too slow. It takes about 15 seconds to compile the project and run on the device.

The gradle.properties is already set to:

org.gradle.daemon=true

org.gradle.parallel=true

Edit: Awesome!!! Colleague of me reported that Jack and Jill might be the solution: http://www.infoworld.com/article/2856113/mobile-technology/androids-new-jack-and-jill-compilers-head-uphill-to-developers.html I'm reading into it.

Checkout this explanation: https://www.saikoa.com/blog/the_upcoming_jack_and_jill_compilers_in_android

Edit 2: New info on Jack and Jill!: http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/jackandjill

Edit 3: Android Studio 2.0 seems to release us from all the burden! Check out "Instant Run". http://android-developers.blogspot.nl/2015/11/android-studio-20-preview.html

Answer 1

There are two main tasks to configure your build to reduce the build time.

First, you have to configure your compilation with special flags to make it faster. Edit your gradle.properties or local.properties files as follow:

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx3072m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.configureondemand=true
android.enableBuildCache=true

Explanation:

• At least 3gb of memory are required by the new option included in Android Studio 2.2 dexing-in-process. If your computer doesn't have enough memory you can adjust this attribute to something more appropriate for your setup.
• Build Cache is a new feature introduced in Android Studio 2.2 that improve a lot the builds. More info here http://tools.android.com/tech-docs/build-cache . In Android Studio 2.3 or superior is true by default

With this configuration, build time is often reduced from 2-3 minutes to 30 seconds or less. The most important part is the configureondemand attribute. More info here to configure Android Studio parameters

First, one is compiling your project with a minSDKVersion >= 21*. If your app has lower min SDK version you can create a special productFlavour for development purposes as follow:

productFlavors {

    production {
        minSdkVersion 15
        ...
    }

    development {
        minSdkVersion 21
        ...
    }
}

*Important, with Android Studio 2.4 this is not needed anymore because the IDE make this automatically.