Gradle is very slow with no reason

Hi -

I have a demo project with literally nothing in it.

I have a build.gradle with only 'task hello' in it. In other words a perfectly legitimate but useless build script.

When using the JetGradle task list to run the task it takes over 8 seconds! To do nothing!?

What is going on here, there is no call to the compiler, no packaging, nothing. I assume that it is just painfully slow in start up and tear down.

Is there a way to make gradle run faster?

thanks