Shrinking Elephants: Managing large projects with Gradle
12 days ago
- #Kotlin
- #IntelliJ IDEA
- #Gradle
- IntelliJ IDEA sync for large Kotlin projects with over 2000 Gradle subprojects can take up to 8.4 minutes under optimal conditions.
- Cold sync scenarios, such as after a git pull, can extend sync times to 24.7 minutes, with significant time spent downloading dependencies.
- The IDE sync process involves Gradle configuring the build and executing model builders to enable smart editing features, which is inherently slow.
- Telemetry from Develocity and the build-sync-metrics plugin provides insights into sync performance, revealing mean sync time reductions from over 4 minutes to about 90 seconds.
- Benchmarks are crucial for testing interventions before applying them to developers, with gradle-profiler being the tool of choice.
- Key interventions to improve sync performance include enabling parallel model fetching, using Spotlight to trim the project dependency graph, intransitive sync to reduce dependency resolution, and artifact-swap to replace project dependencies with precompiled artifacts.
- Pre-fetching dependencies can reduce dependency download times during sync by up to 83%, significantly improving the developer experience.
- Future interventions aim to clean up the dependency graph, refine project structure, and adopt Gradle's Isolated Projects feature for better performance.
- The cumulative impact of these interventions can reduce IDE sync time by up to 97%, from 8.4 minutes to about 15 seconds.