I have jvisualvm, but it does not seem to have a way to attach itself to a process yet to be started. I could start gradle inside Eclipse and set a breakpoint, but then I’m back at using the Eclipse debugger 
I just did a gradlew.
Took 35:23 seconds. Given that it’s expected to run on the order of magnitude of an hours, overall performance on the machine seems quite healthy.
What do you mean, you did a gradlew? Are you talking about building Gradle itself? 35 minutes would roughly match the time it takes on my laptop.
Exactly, I built gradle itself. Also made it generate an eclipse project, the import just went through and I’ll see what needs fixing to make it run inside the debugger so I can finally attach jvisualvm to is :-)))
(Seems like I need to install Groovy support first. Ah well… always been wanting to take a look at Groovy.)
Hm. Seems like the Eclipse setup requires a lot more than “some manual fixes”, there was nothing in the build path at all. I’m not even sure what the main class is, there are so many… ah well, I’m giving up on that path for now.
What next?
You might want to try a different profiler. E.g. see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7096121/profile-entire-java-program-execution-in-visualvm
Been there, seen it, didn’t want to load a flurry of new plugins to an already-sluggish Eclipse…
What’s weird is that the timings are now down to 1.8 seconds for the trivial “hello” build, and 2.8 seconds for the easiest java-example build. This is regardless of whether there’s an Internet connection or not. I haven’t changed a thing, except (a) moving to another location with a different Internet connection, and (b) of course there have been some automatic updates (but none seemed Java-related). Totally weird. As the saying goes: In IT and in court, anything is possible.
Are these new timings still out of the ordinary, or should I assume that’s normal gradle performance?
If that’s without using the Gradle daemon, it sounds alright.
Okay, with daemon, it goes down to 0.7 seconds. I guess I’ll chalk that up to spurious moon phase.
Thanks for the help!