# Incremental Java Compile has been very temperamental
**URL:** https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313
**Category:** Help/Discuss
**Created:** [August 23, 2018, 5:26pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313 "2018-08-23T17:26:23Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@arahman](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/arahman)
#### Post date: [August 23, 2018, 5:26pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313/1 "2018-08-23T17:26:23Z")
Hi,
I have a Spring Project with about 3500 files. 99% of the files are currently generated off a third party codegen library JOOQ. When I change in the remaining 1% of the files it sometimes does a full javaCompile and sometimes does incremental build - as if it has a mind of its own.
When it does a full compile for small code changes during the change -\> build -\> run cycle is it very disruptive as full build takes over 5 minutes. Every second or third recompile this happens.
I have this entry in **gradle.build** :
tasks.withType(JavaCompile) {
//enable compilation in a separate daemon process
options.fork = true
//enable incremental compilation
options.incremental = true
}
And this is what **gradle.properties** looks like:
org.gradle.java.home=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0\_181
org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.configureondemand=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
How can this be fixed?
---
### Author:  [@st\_oehme](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/st_oehme)
#### Post date: [August 24, 2018, 7:21am UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313/2 "2018-08-24T07:21:13Z")
You’re probably changing a file with a public constant, which requires a full recompile because constants can be inlined anywhere, so our bytecode analysis can’t reliably detect who uses them. Avoid public constants and use static methods instead.
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### Author:  [@arahman](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/arahman)
#### Post date: [August 29, 2018, 12:38pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313/3 "2018-08-29T12:38:39Z")
Setting up build caching in the gradle.properties file seems to have made it a lot better.
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### Author:  [@st\_oehme](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/st_oehme)
#### Post date: [August 29, 2018, 12:43pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313/4 "2018-08-29T12:43:14Z")
Caching and incremental compile are completely unrelated. The only thing that caching would improve is if you go back and forth between branches a lot or you do changes and then undo them again. Caching doesn’t help with incremental changes.
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### Author:  [@arahman](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/arahman)
#### Post date: [August 29, 2018, 1:19pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/incremental-java-compile-has-been-very-temperamental/28313/5 "2018-08-29T13:19:36Z")
Ok, magically the issue stopped immediately after I updated the gradle.build file, unsure then of what it may have been.
Thanks for the feedback.