Is there a way to disable the "Updating Symbols..." process in Android Studio?

Question

I have a very large C++ ndk gradle project that I'm importing into Android Studio. Everytime I import or I change the build variant, Android Studio will "update the symbols" which can take up to 20 min for a release build and around 5 min for a debug build. It also uses huge amounts of memory and CPU (I needed to increase the default AS java memory settings to 4x the default values for the "Updating symbols..." phase to even complete.)

Running "./gradlew installRelease" on the command-line (without AS) does not seem to require this step. So what does "Updating symbols..." actually do - and more importantly - is there any way I can disable it.

Answer 1

Unfortunately there's no way at present to directly disable this, though you can work around it by removing headers from the Android Studio project view.