Develop Reference

Android Emulator laggy even with all optimizations

HAXM Enabled version 7.1.0 and i verified that it's working when the emulator is running
The emulator is using the Nvidia GPU however it's barely using maximum 7% of the GPU at any given time
I have 27.3.1 of Emulator version ( Latest )
Tried x86 image and x86_x64 image
I tried hardware acceleration
I tried software acceleration
I bumped the emulator ram to 4GB (I have 20 GB)
I set the emulator CPU priority to real time
I have NOTHING but Android Studio, and emulator running
The emulator is running horribly slow and laggy and even gives a black screen when going from activity to another
This has been the case since forever
I tried deleting the entire Android SDK and installing from scratch
I have intel virtual technology enabled in BIOS
I tried Google Apis vs none Google Apis emulators
I tried Nexus 5, X, Pixel 1, 2, XL with android P, O, 16 and all laggy

This is what helped me with my Android 9 emulator:
Use Google Play x86 image instead of Google API x86 image, because the former had a notification "Preparing for setup.." which never finished.
After launching the emulator first time, going through the initial google device setting (skipping what can be skipped..) and setting up the SD card (as an external storage).
If there are some app updates running, wait for it and then force quit 'Google play services' app. If the emulator will be slow again after reboot, you might want to do this after every launch.
Disable mobile data in settings, because it was trying to connect again and again, using up all CPU. And CPU helps with rendering, so if there is no available CPU, it gets slow.
Edit:
5. Go to emulator Settings/Advanced and set OpenGL ES rendered to Desktop native OpenGL and OpenGl ES API level to Renderer maximum and reboot the emulator. In my case, using autoselect/autodetect had far worse performance.

-- this is a follow up for my comment above (it's too long to be written as a comment) --
then we established that the problem is coming from your compute (or your OS) - If you're using a Laptop make sure to check the settings of the laptop performance when plugged and when you're using a batterie. In case you have a desktop check also the settings if there is some sort of limitation set by the OS. That can happen to avoid overhitting and loud fan noises. If any of the above doesn't work and you still really wanna figure this problem out and I'll assume you're using Windows 10, then install Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution as a second OS just to try things out. If The problem is solved then you definitely need to change some settings in your windows.

For anyone looking for an answer. I simply updated windows 10 to a newer version and update my graphics card drivers and the emulator is insanely fast again.

I had the same issue on my laptop and also on my high-end PC. I tried everything I could find on the internet:
updating HAXM to the latest version (in SDK Manager)
disabling Hyper-V on Windows
disabling audio in emulator
disabling multi-core feature
changing the renderer
disabling snapshots [1]
Now, I cannot be 100 % sure that anything from above could not somehow contribute to fixing the issue (even that I changed most of it back), but the issue disappeared immediately after I did this:
Go to SDK Manager -> Install the latest SDK Platform
There is said in Android Developers User Guide [1] that these are the requirements for Graphics Acceleration:
SDK Tools: Latest release recommended (version 17 minimum)
SDK Platform: Latest release recommended (Android 4.0.3, Revision 3, minimum)
Even that I did have SDK Platform version 27, for some reason I believe that HW acceleration was not working, cause even moving the emulator windows was laggy (or even its settings). As I said before, latest SDK Platform version seems to be the thing that fixed it.
Also, do not forget to kill all emulator processes and also Android Studio. But maybe restart the whole computer just to be sure (I was doing it a lot, cause I was also checking a bios virtualization settings few times).
If it won't work for you, try turn off the snapshots as that was the last before I tried this. You will have to wipe the data from that image, or even better - create a new AVD and download the latest image from "Recommended" tab.
Hope this will be helpful to someone as I did spend several frustrating hours fixing it (after few months of living with it).

Disabling mobile data is one way that works if you're not connected already to data (regardless of wifi connection), another debugging tool that could help you is the FPS Meter in the Debugging Options in Android, relevant github guide

If your emulator is SUDDENLY slow, this might be the reason:
I ran through the same issue.
I then realized that it was a picture quality issue.
So if you're using a lot of pictures in your app, it will run slow unless you 'lower the picture quality'.
You can use http://compressimage.toolur.com/ to reduce your image quality.

Android emulator keeps on crashing

Whenever I open the AVD Manager and launch any one of the virtual devices I created, the emulator starts and closes immediately. When I run the virtual device in AVD Manager for the first time I get an error message that QEMU has stopped working.
I have given the right path to the JDK. More over, I have tried to install Android Studio again and again, but still its not working. I am using Windows 7(32 bit, 2GB RAM, without graphic card).
Is there need of graphic card to run emulator? If not, what should I do the run the emulator?

In AVD manager open settings for your virtual device.
In the Emulated Performance section open the dropdown for Graphics.
Change it from Automatic to Software.
Hit the Finish button to save new setting and try starting the emulator again.

I finally found the solution here: https://www.bram.us/2017/05/12/fix-for-the-android-emulator-crashing-during-launch/
It seems to be an incompatibility with other software, such as Docker, Oracle Virtual Box and other products that use VCPU. In my case, it seems that VBox and/or DraftSight caused the issue. I don't get the error when I terminate those applications first.

After trying Vahid's answer, it stopped crashing. Unfortunately it was lagging badly. After installing the NVIDIA drivers for my card (I have a 1060), I was able to change the setting to Hardware again, and now it is much smoother.

In most cases the solution provided above by #Vahid would work but if for some reason you still want to use hardware for graphics. You can try upgrading graphics drivers and make sure to set your graphic profile aka GPU workload to Graphics instead of compute. This settings can be found in Nvidia control panel or AMD Radeon software settings, not sure if this would work for integrated graphics.

Genymotion became laggy

My Genymotion devices became very laggy, I don't know when this began to happen exactly (maybe after switching to Yosemite).
I tried everything, reinstall Genymotion, latest VirtualBox version, new device images, older Android versions, lower screen resolution, les RAM/CPU, more RAM/CPU, disconnect external screen. I ran open GL benchmarks that seemed OK.
The only weird thing I noticed is a high CPU usage from the VBoxHeadless process when idle (50% ~ 100%). I checked system monitor, Logcat, VirtualBox logs and everything else I could think of.
I am running on an iMac with OS X 10.10.1 on an SSD, 2.5Ghz Core i5, 8GB of RAM and an AMD Radeon 6750M 512 Mo. Genymotion 2.3.1, VirtualBox 4.3.20, the latest 'Custom Phone 5.0.0 Lollipop' image.
The other weird thing is that once in a while (I launched a device a lot of times and this happened only once), the device will run very smoothly (as it was running before).
Any clues on what might be the origin of this problem?

Can you try changing the device's CPU number to 1?
On the devices list, click on the settings button on the right
Then set the CPU number to 1 for each device you want to use
This workaround should work.
If not, I advise you to push the problem to the support team including your host's configuration, genymotion version, ...

Android Emulator slugish performance

I have intel i7 quad core with 4GB of ram but when I try to run my app on the emulator, God it takes a hell lot of time. Some times more than 5 minutes. I am not emulating any game or graphics intensive thing. I am learning android so just trying simple aps but still it is very slow. Moreover today I found this emulator has stop playing any music or sound I used the in the programs, I made previously. What can be the reason of this weird behaviour and slow speed.
How can I fix it? I am on Windows 7
PS: when I try to type in an app from user keyboard, the emulator doesn't take any input unless I use the emulator keyboard. Can I change its settings to take input from keyboard.
Regards

Open android sdk manager, in extras, install "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager", and use x86 images (there are two available, one 2.3.3, one 4.0.3) provided by intel.
On windows, android SDK Manager only downloads the installer of IntelHaxm, so you have to go in and install it yourself. Usually you can find it under
android-sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and install IntelHaxm.exe as admin.
4GB of RAM imho is not enough, windows 7 and eclipse together takes more than 2GB out on my system. 8GB is minimum and the more the better.

The emulator has always painfully slow for me; I've never gotten any of the standard speed suggestions to work. However, if you have a device available, testing directly on it is much, much faster.

Is there any way to reduce the boot up time of Android Emulator provided with android SDK

On my system, i am using eclipse ganymede version along the Android SDK and ADT plugin installed. I have created an android AVD (target android 1.5) with 512MB of memory. Its quite frustrating to see the slow boot up of it. It takes around 4-5 mins to complete its boot-up. Is there any way or tweak to speed up this boot up process.
PC config:
P4 2.4 Ghz with 1 GB ram.

You can use the -no-boot-anim command line option which speeds up the boot process by not showing the boot animation while the emulator starts up. It makes an noticeable difference on my system reducing start up time from around 55 seconds to nearer 45 seconds. (In case you're interested this is on a laptop with a Mobile Core 2 Duo L9400 and 3GB of RAM.)
Use a command line like this to start the emulator:
emulator -no-boot-anim #YourAvdName
where YourAvdName is the name of the Android Virtual Device (AVD) image that you want to start.

There is now way of to speed up the boot process. This is the downside of having a real emulator not just a simulator like the Iphone kit offers.
You don't have to quit the emulator after a test run. Just start the emulator at the beginning of your work and close it after you are finished. If you want to test something very quick I often find it easier to just connect my actual device and run my app on the real device, without waiting for the emulator to start up.

There's no real way to cut the time down significantly, and it performs so poorly as a tablet device, it's barely usable. Bottom line, you need a real device to produce production apps. It's good for learning though.
The "emulator" is widely known for being a simulator. It does not:
come with device roms or known emulation for real world devices
off phone or SMS support
have the ability to open listening sockets for incoming requests
etc etc. It is not an emulator like mame. It's a simulator like the iPhone/iPad simulator.

i started off with the default settings on the AVD manager to create a new AVD and it started up kind of ok, about 1-2 mins. later i deleted that and created a new AVD with 8GB internal memory (like the real device i'm using) and startup didn't! i waited 30 mins but still nothing
so i reverted to the default memory (512MB) and it seems to start ok
but i also noticed, its a bad idea to unclick the hardware buttons options, that causes it to load slow too

install virtualbox and use androVM
much better than the emulator

The option that I select so far is to buy a cheap mobile from Kogan.com and use this is your app tester.
Otherwise you can also go and install Genymotion, which is definitely a ++ tool over AVD through Android Studio.
It is fast as well. However, keep in mind that there are many features that will be missing such as google play services. Thus, it is advisable that you buy a device. With Android supported mobile, you could basically do everything and simulate every events such as swipe shake etc...