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Despite this, my android emulator is a lot laggy. Animations are a lot jerky and it's not smooth at all. What should I do to speed up android emulator? I've read this: Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator? and tried things listed but it isn't working.
What should I do?
Apparently, in your environment, the x86 images perform better than the x86_64 ones. Whether that is tied to your CPU (i5 vs. i7) or something else, I can't say.
Moral of this story: try a variety of emulator images to see what the problem is. CPU architecture, screen resolution, GPU emulation mode, and such all affect performance.
Related
I'm on Windows 7 with i7 processor and I'm trying to use Android SDK Emulator. However, when I set pixel density to 320 and turn GPU emulation on it starts to lag and freeze and its browser is almost not usable (it's like 1 frame or less per second).
So far with the below settings it's much, much better and I would qualify it as 5 to 10FPS which is usable but it's not 30FPS (smooth usage).
Abstracted LCD Density - 120
GPU Emulation - NO
Keyboard Support - YES
Can anything else be done to make it work smooth except moving to Linux? I noticed that GPU emulation impacted the performance the most.
The most important setting is your architecture, make sure you are using an Intel emulator. The speedup is tremendous!
A how-to is posted here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10772162/1741111
If you are trying to achieve that 30FPS mark, forget Android emulator and switch to Genymotion.
I was working on Android emulators for 6 or more months before i discovered Genymotion emulator and what difference that has made to the speed of development.
If you are still developing on Android emulator - go and give Genymotion a try. You will thank me for that. Its a huge difference.
There is a free version for individual developers.
Even though this is an old post. I think this needs a mention here.
You don't need to buy a phone. The emulator is a great tool, however very slow. You can enable hardware acceleration to make it run smoothly. Follow the steps on the developers page and you'll notice a remarkable difference in the speed. AFAIK the settings you mentioned do no have that great influence on the speed.
I have wrote a short blog post on speeding up the emulator and adding Google map support:
the first part will be relevant to you. try the Hardware acceleration and tell us what you think:
here is the post:
Speeding Up the Emulator
The best emulator is to buy a simple Android Smartphone and debug/run your apps on this device. I'm doing this and it works wonderfully with no laggs
So far I have been developing directly on my galaxy nexus and nexus 7 using the amazing AID app.
However, as the N7 can't provide logs due to it being jelly bean, i feel the need to get a mini notebook in order to utilise adb logcat.
My main worry is that something with only 1gb (2gb if i upgrade, which i will) and a 1.5-1.83GHz atom CPU won't be powerful enough.
I can possibly get around certain worries by not using emulators and testing directly on my two devices, so that will save me a great deal. Also I am tempted to just use vim and command line tools instead of eclipse which again might save me from a slow PC.
What do you guys think? Is the notebook way under powered? What if i just use vim and no emulators?
Side note, does anyone actually code in vim/command line?
something with only 1gb (2gb if i upgrade, which i will) and a 1.5-1.83GHz atom CPU
will work just fine, as long as you're not planning to run a tablet emulator. I sometimes have to work at my Asus EEEPC with the same exact CPU and I've got no problems so far
It is doable with 1gb RAM and using vim/commandline tools. However, eclipse provides a project wide perspective which is hard to duplicate in vim (vim power users may be as productive, if not more though). So in terms of memory 1, 2gb RAM will be fine. Testing on devices is always better than emulators.
One thing else though, a commandline build with multiple module dependency is non-trivial to setup and maintain. This is because Google has historically been modifying the build.xml file, breaking existing build scripts fairly regularly. So if you are well versed with build script internals and prepared to work on them you should be ok.
Debugging Android apps without Eclipse based breakpoint debugging support may be a significant issue too. Some bugs are caught in a lot lesser time with this. So plan accordingly if you don't want to use Eclipse.
Eclipse also provides very good JUnit/Robotium support for writing test cases, You won't get this with vim.
As I wrote down these points I think running Eclipse in 2gb notebook should be possible (just don't run other apps with doing development) and thus is recommended.
I have extensively used vim just not for Android development. You can also install vim plugin for eclipse if you prefer that.
Modern notebook hardware certainly is capable for software development; in fact, many (hobbyists as well as professionals) use a notebook as their main development platform.
However, with a mini / ultra-small form factor, you'll pay more for a less capable machine. Unless you need extreme mobility, I would suggest a standard notebook, with a little extra money spent on RAM (8+ GB) and an SSD. (Then, neither big IDEs nor emulation is out of scope.) If money is an issue, you can still get clunky-looking, but fairly powerful 15" or 17" laptops.
i think you Configuration is good enought to run Eclipse , Myself i had to Remove some Composant on my PC beacause we have 1 PC for Work/Internet/Eclipse and 1 PC for Gaming Etc ... , iam using Galaxy S2 and dont use Emulator many times , Yes i have some Slow Down some Time , but try Eclipse with the Minimal Configuration and No Emulators but Upgrade to 2 GB i have myself 2 GB Here and DUal Core E5200
Yeah that's under powered. For a windows PC I'd want 4gb of ram, not sure about Linux but atoms are dog slow either way.
I'm sure it'll work but it won't be fun, I'd be most worried about disk speed as that's what drives me nuts most.
I'd also take advantage of the ide and all its nice features too
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Possible Duplicate:
Slow Android emulator
is it my computer's hardware limitation? it has 1024 megabytes of ram 2200 x 2 dual core amd cpu i can't develop any android. the emulators are heavy what can I do? i download old sdk and newer ones but it still the same.
You could try using the x86 (Atom) system image it's faster than the arm images
See this link for more info
I have much better PC than you and even I have difficulties with emulating some OpenGL ES applications that I develop for android.
You must understand that emulating a CPU which is different than current architecture is very hard to do and as such very hard to do very optimized. Running machine code for ARM on x86 must bring some delays in running it. Conversion and repacking back and forth.
I would rather try to use your own Android device for testing and debuging purposes instead of emulator. It runs in real time and it will be better for you if you don't want to upgrade your CPU and RAM.
1 gigabyte of ram isn't enough. Eclipse alone would take up almost a two-thirds of that
(mine takes up 900mb - tweaked in eclipse.ini), and a 2.2 Emulator on HomeScreen would take up about 200mb. Unless you don't open anything else while coding - firefox, chrome (that ram sucker of a browser), mail client, chat client, etc., you're only a pinch below the limit.
The best you can do outside of upgrading memory is to run emulator in QVGA (in AVD Manager, click on your virtual device, click edit, under Skin, change Built-in to QVGA. But it would only do so much - you need at least 4 gig to go smoothly with all other apps open.
This is a general question. I am trying to create apps for Google TV using the 3.1 Honeycomb OS, which is not yet available on Google TV... Only on Android Tablets. I know that using a device is much faster, but I cannot use it yet.
Therefore, until later this summer I must use the emulator.
The video card on my computer is pretty weak, I do not know what it is at the moment, but I can tell you it was a bargain-bin card. I have 1.5G of DDR RAM, Win XP 32bit, plenty of storage, and almost nothing installed on the computer (I just wiped it this week).
If anyone thinks getting a new video card would improve my performance, please say so.
Getting a new video card probably won't help much, AFAIK. I have a notebook with 128MB discrete video RAM and a desktop with 512MB video RAM. Both have the same approximate single-core CPU speed (2.5GHz dual-core vs. 2.66GHz quad-core), and they have comparable Android 3.1 emulator performance.
While graphics are at the heart of the performance issue with the Android 3.1 emulator, it is unclear how much qemu uses hardware graphics acceleration, and the emulator itself has to do all its rendering using software, since it does not have access to the underlying actual hardware.
If you only have, say, $50 to spend, I'd bump up your RAM, so you can allocate 1024MB to the device RAM setting of the AVD. That is known to incrementally improve matters. It is still slow, but not as horrible.
Video Cards and Processor its really important to the emulator speed, i dont know what processor you have, so cant know for sure if only upgrading the Video Card will make a lot of diference but it will definitly be better that the performance you have now.
Is there any way to get the emulator work normally ?
Its still very slow and useless, I tried adjusting the cache size and Ram.
My system configuration is quite good, are there any tips and hints to speed up the avd ?
Not much you can do, but Al Sutton lays out some things that can help a bit.
http://blog.alsutton.com/2011/01/27/the-android-honeycomb-preview-emulator/
For serious development, you'll need a Honeycomb tablet.
You may have heard the many complaints about how slow the Honeycomb emulator is. And indeed, the Android emulators have long been slow. Certainly slower than most phones. But Honeycomb is slower, so much so, that even Google engineers have admitted it makes more sense to develop testing on a real tablet.
Now my experience has been a little surprising: on my 1.6(?)GHz Pentium with 4G of memory running Win7, I have been surprised at how fast it runs. That is, I was prepared for the worse, yet found the response time to taps surprisingly reasonable.
That said, it is still noticeably slower than the 2.2 emulator. But not as slow as the real hardware we had to suffer with in the 80s;)
Finally, not only the emulator, but the whole SDK (including that memory hog Eclipse) become a LOT more usable when you have at least 3.5G of memory available. This means a 4G stick. When I was trying to run the 1.6 SDK under Linux with only 2G, it was frustrating how often Eclipse locked up. But with 4G, it is fine. So upgrade your memory to at least 4G before you worry about other measures, such as faster CPU.