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that doesn’t sound good! Have you tried looking through these performance tips? <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/performance.html>

that also doesn't sound right, tests should be using the expanded output classes and resources directories directly and not depending on packing jars

Yes, I have tried several of the tips there: increased heap size, parallel execution, caches, etc. Though I am relatively new to Gradle so can't be much sure myself. If this is not the expected behvaiour, what could be causing this?

for example, it is possible to modify <https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.tasks.testing.Test.html#org.gradle.api.tasks.testing.Test:testClassesDirs> so that Gradle scans all dependencies for tests, but by default that does not happen (it defaults to only looking at tests defined in the local project's test sources)

and if all the tests are bundled in a separate sub-project of a multi-project build? and the "test" sub-project's build script adds dependencies on the other sub-projects to be tested?

that sounds like a bad idea, but it still depends on how that is done

correct use of <https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/java_library_plugin.html> should result in no JAR packing needed for local subprojects, but it's also quite possible to do it wrongly as well

I think I found it, thank you very much for the help!