# \--profile is significantly less useful than before **URL:** \ **Category:** Help/Discuss\ **Created:** [December 13, 2016, 9:35pm UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/profile-is-significantly-less-useful-than-before/20795 "2016-12-13T21:35:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 6
**Author:** ![xtracoder](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/x/45deac/32.png) [@xtracoder](https://discuss.gradle.org/u/xtracoder)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2016, 5:09am UTC](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/profile-is-significantly-less-useful-than-before/20795/6 "2016-12-21T05:09:14Z")
Re: _Now I’ve got it running and I’d like to show everyone how much faster it is than Maven… except I can’t. It isn’t faster. It’s about the same_. … just a ‘side note’ … We’ve switched to Gradle from Maven and are running on Gradle for roughly 1.5 year. I would say that in terms of full ‘clean’ build they are indeed ‘about the same’ (note: I see you did not try executing MAVEN in multi-threaded mode – something like `mvn clean install -T 8` - in our case it reduced build time by 60-70%). The killer feature of Gradle is its flexibility in terms of configuration – we have roughly 400 modules in main part of the project - most of them are of 3-4 typical types. Gradle can inject external configuration scripts via ‘apply from’ and by using this feature overall size of build configuration reduced 100 times – type of the module is now encoded in the module folder name, e.g. via suffix ‘-api’, ‘-impl’, ‘-web’ and 99% of configuration is performed from root `build.gradle` via invocation of ‘api.gradle’ and so on … this is a bit oversimplified, but just to give an idea. (Note: configuring Gradle is also not a piece of cake – on large-scale projects. It took from us roughly 1 FTE-month to make initial build with Gradle so that all features of previous MAVEN build were still in place – missing intellisense for DSL, missing plugins, glitches with integration of 3rd party staff and so on). In terms of performance I would say you can get significant performance difference vs. MAVEN only on incremental builds. - Unlike maven Gradle does check for non-changed code and builds only required parts (same can be done in MAVEN via some hacks, but – they are hacks) - Gradle has ‘configureondemand’ feature – this way build of individual sub-module can be significantly faster, i.e. out of 400 only 40 required modules will be initialized. Though this feature has few problems: - Build configuration should be thoroughly crafted - i.e. never use ‘projects.all’ or ‘subprojects.all’ – this triggers configuration of ‘all’ modules. Instead – use in root project `gradle.beforeProject` or ‘gradle.afterProject’ - ‘parallel’ and ‘configureondemand’ are ‘incubating’ features – as long as I use Gradle 🙂 – various unexpected things may happen (and some-time build fails somewhere in Gradle’s internals - some time it takes days to identify the root cause). For example Gradle itself fails to build when ‘configureondemand’ is turned ‘on’ (see [Cannot build official Gradle repo](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/cannot-build-official-gradle-repo/16451)). --- _[View the full topic](https://discuss.gradle.org/t/profile-is-significantly-less-useful-than-before/20795)._