Skip to main content

Gradle build and daemon issues

This article addresses some Gradle issues you might encounter with Harness Continuous Integration (CI).

Out of memory errors with Gradle​

If a Gradle build experiences out of memory errors, add the following to your gradle.properties file:

-XX:+UnlockExperimentalVMOptions -XX:+UseContainerSupport

Your Java options must use UseContainerSupport instead of UseCGroupMemoryLimitForHeap, which was removed in JDK 11.

Configure service dependencies in Gradle builds​

You can use Background steps to manage long-running service dependencies for Gradle builds. You can also launch services ad-hoc by using commands or flags (such as --daemon) in your steps.

Enable the Gradle daemon in builds​

To enable the Gradle daemon in your Harness CI builds, include the --daemon option when running Gradle commands in your build scripts (such as in Run steps or in build arguments for Build and Push steps). This option instructs Gradle to use the daemon process.

Optionally, you can use Background steps to optimize daemon performance.

Manage Gradle daemon dependencies to improve performance​

In Harness CI builds, each step runs in a separate container. If your pipeline has multiple steps that utilize Gradle through CLI, each step initiates a separate Gradle daemon (unless you explicitly set --no-daemon).

To optimize the build process and improve performance, use a Background step to create a single Gradle daemon that can be used by all subsequent steps in the stage. This reduces the overhead of daemon startup and enhances the efficiency of the entire pipeline.

              - step:
                  type: Background
                  name: Gradle_Daemon
                  identifier: Gradle_Daemon
                  spec:
                    connectorRef: YOUR_DOCKER_CONNECTOR_ID
                    image: gradle
                    shell: Sh
                    entrypoint:
                      - gradle
                    envVariables:
                      GRADLE_USER_HOME: /harness/.gradle
                      GRADLE_OPTS: "-Dorg.gradle.jvmargs=\"-Xms1024m -Xmx2048m\""
                    resources:
                      limits:
                        memory: 1G

Parallel Gradle builds fail with "Currently in use by another Gradle instance"​

Multiple parallel steps attempting to run gradle build (or other tasks) can cause the following error when multiple steps attempt to acquire lock on the same file:

Timeout waiting to lock checksums cache. It is currently in use by another Gradle instance.

To resolve this, set a custom GRADLE_USER_HOME directory for each daemon. Add the following commands before your first gradle TASK command in each step, and make sure the custom path is not in your stage's shared paths.

mkdir -p /tmp/gradlehome
export GRADLE_USER_HOME=/tmp/gradlehome

For more information and discussion on this Gradle error, go to:

Gradle version not compatible with Test Intelligence.​

For information about Gradle compatibility with TI and how to modify build.gradle for TI, go to Enable TI for Java, Kotlin, or Scala - Build Tool - Java Gradle compatibility.