diff --git a/.github/workflows/docker-unified.yml b/.github/workflows/docker-unified.yml
index f83d1ff85e15d..d6b1fcdb6dd6e 100644
--- a/.github/workflows/docker-unified.yml
+++ b/.github/workflows/docker-unified.yml
@@ -1030,6 +1030,7 @@ jobs:
           TEST_STRATEGY: ${{ matrix.test_strategy }}
         run: |
           echo "$DATAHUB_VERSION"
+          ./gradlew --stop
           ./smoke-test/smoke.sh
       - name: Disk Check
         run: df -h . && docker images
diff --git a/gradle.properties b/gradle.properties
index 60ea124684a04..e42e18dab677b 100644
--- a/gradle.properties
+++ b/gradle.properties
@@ -2,8 +2,13 @@ org.gradle.configureondemand=true
 org.gradle.parallel=true
 org.gradle.caching=true
 
+# Cycle daemons after 30m
+org.gradle.daemon.idletimeout=1800000
+
 # Increase gradle JVM memory to 5GB to allow tests to run locally
-org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx5120m
+org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx5120m -XX:MaxMetaspaceSize=512m
+org.gradle.workers.max=4
+
 # Increase retries to 5 (from default of 3) and increase interval from 125ms to 1s.
 # Based on this thread https://github.com/gradle/gradle/issues/4629, it's unclear
 # if we should be using systemProp or not.  We're using both for now.