Is Gradle slower on Linux?

Old Forum
1

I have an empty gradle project, with just the gradle wrapper setup in it. On a Centos 6.3 virtual machine in VirtualBox, with the gradle daemon running, it takes ~15-18 seconds to run ‘gradle tasks’. The same exact project in my Windows host takes ~1 second to run ‘gradle tasks’.

Is Linux performance a known issue? Or is it possibly just my setup that is being slow? I have not had Linux virtual machines (Debian) be slow before, but using Centos and Gradle is new to me, so I’m trying to narrow down which is the issue.

2

On the Centos: How are you setting Gradle into daemon mode? How are you confirming that the daemon is staying up between runs?

3

Hello Peter, thank you for responding.

I am setting gradle into daemon mode using the gradle.properties:

org.gradle.daemon=true

And there are two ways that I confirm that the daemon must be running:

$ ps -ef | grep gradle
mbelling
 614 32714
0 14:05 pts/0
  00:00:00 grep gradle
mbelling 32144
   1
5 12:52 ?
      00:03:43 /usr/java/jdk1.7.0_10/bin/java -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Xmx1024m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -cp /home/mbelling/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-1.3-bin/6duudkdtsf89ftu9dh8bpgenv0/gradle-1.3/lib/gradle-launcher-1.3.jar org.gradle.launcher.daemon.bootstrap.GradleDaemon 1.3 /home/mbelling/.gradle/daemon 10800000 e622729c-2f93-4b32-9ace-4f858266e4e2 -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Xmx1024m -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

The other way is to run without the gradle daemon and it takes longer:

With daemon running:

$ gradle tasks
... stuff ...
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
  Total time: 15.728 secs

Without daemon running:

$ gradle tasks --no-daemon
... stuff ...
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
  Total time: 40.452 secs
4

Can you try using the fully qualified path to the Gradle binary?

I want to isolate some kind of PATH issue on that platform.

5

I originally ‘installed’ the unzipped gradle to /opt/gradle-1.3.

I then set up the build.gradle and used the gradle wrapper command to place the proper things in my project for gradle wrapper.

$ /opt/gradle-1.3/bin/gradle tasks
... stuff ...
Total time: 15.07 secs

Using gradlew command:

$ ./gradlew tasks
... stuff ...
Total time: 14.498 secs

Direct path to the gradle the gradlew uses:

$ /home/mbelling/.gradle/wrapper/dists/gradle-1.3-bin/6duudkdtsf89ftu9dh8bpgenv0/gradle-1.3/bin/gradle tasks
... stuff ...
Total time: 18.065 secs

My last comment used just ‘gradle’, which is the /opt/gradle-1.3/bin/gradle which is in my PATH.

6

I cloned my repository to a Debian virtual machine I have, and gradle is lightning fast there. I think I’m just going to chalk this up to a poor VM setup.

7

OK - I’ll close this out.

8

Thank you for your time.

9

For what it is worth, I discovered the reason for the slowness on the virtual machine. I used the default motherboard chipset in Virtualbox of “PIIX3”. Apparently there are general I/O issues with Red Hat distributions and that chipset in Virtualbox, and switching the chipset to “ICH9” got rid of the slowness.

10

I am using CentOS through virtualbox. However, I use SATA AHCI and I don’t see bad performance for anything else.