If we want to know more about how much time is spent in tasks we can use the --profile command-line option. Gradle will generate a report file in the build/reports/profile directory. This report file is a HTML file with information about how much time is spent by the different tasks and processes of Gradle.
The following report file is for a Gradle project with the Groovy plugin and we invoked $ gradle --profile build:

Gradle Goodness: Profiling Information