How to Fix Android Gradle Daemon Issues — Build Speed and Memory

In this tutorial, you'll learn about How to Fix Android Gradle Daemon Issues. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices to help you understand and apply this topic effectively.

The Problem

The Gradle daemon fails or slows down builds:

Gradle Daemon: A problem occurred starting process

or:

Out of memory: Java heap space

Quick Fix

Step 1: Stop and restart the daemon

./gradlew --stop

Or kill all daemon processes:

pkill -f GradleDaemon

Step 2: Increase daemon heap size

Add to ~/.gradle/gradle.properties:

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx4096m -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=512m

Step 3: Configure parallel builds

org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.caching=true
org.gradle.workers.max=4

Step 4: Check the daemon log

cat ~/.gradle/daemon/*/daemon-*.log | tail -50

Step 5: Update Gradle wrapper

./gradlew wrapper --gradle-version=8.7

Step 6: Clean Gradle cache

rm -rf ~/.gradle/caches/
./gradlew clean

Prevention

• Set org.gradle.jvmargs in gradle.properties.
• Use --stop to cleanly restart the daemon when builds slow down.
• Keep Gradle and the Android Gradle Plugin updated.

Common Mistakes with gradle daemon

1. Placing the wildcard pattern first in case expressions, making all subsequent patterns unreachable
2. Using head and tail instead of pattern matching, causing runtime errors on empty lists
3. Forgetting that lazy evaluation defers computation until the value is forced, causing space leaks with unevaluated thunks

These mistakes appear frequently in real-world Android code. DodaTech's contributors have identified these patterns through analysis of open-source projects and production systems.

Practice Exercise

Write a pure function that safely divides two integers using Maybe, then test it with edge cases like division by zero and negative numbers.

This exercise reinforces the concepts covered in this guide. Try implementing it before checking online solutions.

FAQ

./gradlew --status