Gradle 9.7 Parallel Configuration Nearly Doubles Android Sync Speed
For teams maintaining large Android monorepos with hundreds or thousands of modules, this is a direct build-time win that requires no code changes beyond removing cross-project state access. The feature also signals that Gradle, Google, and JetBrains are jointly hardening the toolchain's concurrency model, which will eventually benefit every Android developer by default.
The configuration phase of a Gradle build has long been a bottleneck because modules could freely read and write each other's mutable state, making safe parallel execution impossible. Gradle 9.7.0's Isolated Projects feature, built in collaboration with Google and JetBrains, enforces a strict boundary: each project can only touch its own state. This constraint turns configuration into an embarrassingly parallel workload. In a 5,000-module monorepo, Gradle's own benchmarks show sync times dropping from over five minutes to under three. The feature is built on top of the Configuration Cache infrastructure and is now incubating, with plans to become the default mode. Older projects with custom scripts or plugins that rely on cross-project access will break when this is enabled.
The collaboration between Gradle, Google, and JetBrains on this feature shows that the Android build toolchain's concurrency problems are finally being treated as a shared infrastructure concern, not just a plugin or IDE issue.
While the speedup is dramatic for monorepos, the author notes that for developers in China, network latency to remote repositories is often the dominant sync bottleneck, making this optimization less impactful in practice.
Upgrading to Gradle 9.7.0 is described as requiring 'courage,' hinting that the broader ecosystem of Android Gradle plugins is not yet fully compatible with the new isolation rules.