How to reduce the build time of a project using the Firebase Performance Plugin

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Firebase Performance Monitor is a useful tool to make the Android application better. But when it is connected, the assembly time of our project immediately increased by 20-30 seconds, which, you see, is not short.

We are not alone, and I decided to publish the solution found on the Medium. I hope it will help and save you precious time building the project.

How to reduce the build time of a project using the Firebase Performance Plugin

Recently, I added the Firebase Performance Plugin to one of my projects and faced a radical increase in the build time of the application. Initially, the assembly took place in less than 20 seconds, after adding a plug-in - 5-6 minutes. The behavior is annoying, so I looked at what increases the assembly time.

If you look closely, you can see that the next Gradle task takes a very long time:

app:transformClassesWithFirebasePerformancePluginForDebug

There is a post-compilation phase that uses Firebase Performance on Android and leads to an increase in build time.

How to smooth the problem

The fix I applied smoothes the problem by adding a parameter to the build command so that the plugin can be disabled during development.

In the block, root/buildscript/dependencieswrap the plugin classpathin the following condition:

if (!project.hasProperty("disable-performance-plugin")) {
    classpath('com.google.firebase:firebase-plugins:1.1.5') {
        excludegroup: 'com.google.guava', module: 'guava-jdk5'
    }
}

The need for an exception com.google.guavadepends on whether the library leads to conflicts with your dependencies on Guava, as described in the documentation .

Then, app/build.gradle add the following condition:

if (!project.hasProperty("disable-performance-plugin")) { 
    apply plugin: 'com.google.firebase.firebase-perf' 
}

Now you can simply build the project via the command line, using the parameter to disable the plugin:

./gradlew your-task -Pdisable-performance-plugin

If you are using Android Studio to build a project, you can add the same setting in the “Compiler Setup” section. You need to set command line options,