From a posting of Martin:

I found the cause of the delay when debugging gradle and it's not the
repository:

• my project is at /media/sda1/work/...
• however, there are also other smb mounts like /media/share1, ..., which
  are not reachable any more, when I pull my network cable.
• gradle searches for settings in all parent directories by getting
  directory lists and when asking for the files/directories in /media it takes
  a LONG time (because of non-reachable mounts).

So, no big problem, but I would replace the method in
ParentDirSettingsFinderStrategy with this more efficient one, which does not
get all files in the directories (and would not cause the above delay):

    protected File findBeyondCurrentDir(StartParameter startParameter) {
        File searchDir = startParameter.getCurrentDir().getParentFile();
        while (searchDir != null && startParameter.isSearchUpwards()) {
            File settingsFile = new File(searchDir,
startParameter.getSettingsFileName());
            if (settingsFile.exists() && settingsFile.isFile()) {
                return settingsFile;
            }
            searchDir = searchDir.getParentFile();
        }
        return null;
    }