A really nice feature of Gradle is incremental builds, where tasks don't need to be executed unless they would do something useful. The tasks InstallFeatureTask and DeployTask run even if nothing has changed in the project directory. They shouldn't need to run because installing the same thing twice should result in the same result.

The easiest way to demonstrate is to run libertyCreate or deploy twice in a row without changing any files.

For me, the InstallFeatureTask takes approx 1.3 seconds to execute, DeployTask 12 ms, the first is a significant proportion of the whole build time.

The Gradle documentation about up to date checks: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/more_about_tasks.html#sec:up_to_date_checks

A Gradle build scan says about InstallFeatureTask:

The task was not up-to-date because it did not have any declared outputs.

DeployTask has the same message about no declared outputs.