Working on a new Jenkins(1.650)/Gradle(2.11) build for a Spring Framework 3 application that is going to run on Java 8. The build was running on a VM with Centos 7.2.1511 installed.
While attempting to compile with Java 8u74 (oracle/linux/x64), we observed a 2 hour build time for compiling 6 classes. Upon testing the war file produced by the build, we realized that Spring 3 and Java 8 don't see eye to eye. We reverted to compiling with JDK 1.7.0_79 (the only change made), and the build ran in 23 seconds.
Any thoughts on why this happened?