Local developer settings ======================== The first invocation of any task in Lucene/Solr gradle build will generate and save a project-local 'gradle.properties' file. This file contains the defaults you may (but don't have to) tweak for your particular hardware (or taste). This is an overview of some of these settings. Parallelism ----------- Gradle build can run tasks in parallel but by default it consumes all CPU cores which is too optimistic a default for Lucene/Solr tests. You can disable the parallelism entirely or assign it a 'low' priority with these properties: org.gradle.parallel=[true, false] org.gradle.priority=[normal, low] The default level of parallelism is computed based on the number of cores on your machine (on the first run of gradle build). By default these are fairly conservative settings (half the number of cores for workers, for example): org.gradle.workers.max=[X] tests.jvms=[N <= X] The number of test JVMs can be lower than the number of workers: this just means that two projects can run tests in parallel to saturate all the workers. The I/O and memory bandwidth limits will kick in quickly so even if you have a very beefy machine bumping it too high may not help. You can always override these settings locally using command line as well: gradlew -Ptests.jvms=N --max-workers=X Gradle Daemon ------------- The gradle daemon is a background process that keeps an evaluated copy of the project structure, some caches, etc. It speeds up repeated builds quite a bit but if you don't like the idea of having a (sizeable) background process running in the background, disable it. org.gradle.daemon=[true, false] org.gradle.jvmargs=...