Using:

com.android.databinding:dataBinder:1.0-rc1 com.android.tools.build:gradle:1.4.0-beta1

Just adding

apply plugin: 'com.android.databinding'

increases the build time on a non-clean build by a factor of at least 4

easily reproducible in our project adding the plugin makes the build time go from ~1.5 minutes to ~6 minutes with no other changes.

We also use: com.neenbedankt.gradle.plugins:android-apt:1.7 and the latest version of transfuse

A bit more detail can be found here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32543518/missing-time-in-android-gradle-build-profile

Thank you for this suggestion. We will pass this along to the development team and provide updates as they are available.

It seems this was due to some interaction with gradle-retrolambda. Updating to 3.2.3-SNAPSHOT fixed the issue and I no longer experience the "missing" time.

Thank you for updating the issue.