I'm using Android Studio version 3.2 and I have 12GB ram and double graphic cards(NVIDIA and INTEL).
I already installed HAXM and also forces emulator.exe and qemu-system-x86_64.exe to work with NVIDIA.
But still the emulator is extremely slow
My Nexus 5X API 24 and 25 Emulators works well but Nexus 5X API 26 and above are very slow, I check memory and CPU costs in Android Profiler it shows much higher than others, even simulators have the same density.
I think currently we often choose latest Emulators (from API 26 - Android 8.0 and above) ONLY for testing code that relates to OS features changes, for stable and performance testing, we should choose Emulators equal or below API 25 - Android 7.1.
I reported this problem to Google, hope they will make some enhancements soon.
Try this:
Go to the emulator settings and try to select different values for OpenGL ES Renderer:
The Android Emulator is very slow. The main reason is because it is emulating the ARM CPU & GPU, unlike the iOS Simulator, which runs x86 code instead of the ARM code that runs on the actual hardware.
And one more, Why should you not go for Genymotion. I have used as as option for Android Emulator. It is better than Android Emulator.
If you really want to speed up the process, I would like to help you with this.
Follow these steps, ,may be your problem come to an end.
Use actual hardware devices
Don’t Run the Emulator in a Virtual
Machine
I use this configuration on MAC
Configuration Emulator
GPU Mode: Host
Ram: 1024
SDCard Size: 10M
I have HP Laptop with the following configuration -
Processor-Intel Core 2 Duo.
Windows - 7 Home Premium - 32-Bit (SP-1).
Ram - 4GB.
No graphics card(actually some inbuilt graphics support of 256MB I am not sure).
I have installed android studio V3.0(for 32-bit) but when I tried to launch the emulator, (even with arm support) it just starts up and crashes after startup.
I get an error like your processor does not support VT-x. ( I have also checked with Microsoft HAM tool, that my processor does not support it, so I need to use system image with ARM support.)
Now my question is whether I can run ARM support emulator on my machine or not, if yes please tell some crisp and easy steps to do so, since I have also tried 2.7" QVGA screen( lowest resolution) And 128MB Ram allocation, it just crashes after startup with error like-> (Your program has stopped working).
Please suggest any workaround and I shall be very thankful to you.
ARM emulator is very resource intensive, even for current machines. I suggest you to use a real device connected to your development machine.
An alternative could be GenyMotion https://www.genymotion.com/
Android Studio V3.0 doesn't support many features for windows 32 bit System. I recommend you to use Android Studio v2.2.3 instead of 3.0.
U gonna need to enable the VT-X option. Which can be done in the boot menu options. Vt-X is disabled by default in HP laptops.
And HAMx can be downloaded from Intel website. This will help in booting them in the emulator. But with your system configuration, i recommend u stick to eclipse - android.
I am using Android Studio in AMD processor system and the emulator is running very slowly. In the emulator i have allocated RAM size to 1 GB and system image to armeabi-v7a of API-level 23 but still the emulator comes after delay of 10 minutes.please help me in it
Well I suggest you to use Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.
Features
System Requirements
Microsoft Windows 7, 8/8.1, 10 (32/64 bit) 64 bit CPU, with VT-x or
AMD-V capability, enabled in BIOS settings Recent and dedicated GPU
400 MB disk space 2GB RAM
You can use Genymotion which runs very smoothly. Also, you can update your Android Studio to latest version, update your gradle version to latest version. Remove all your old emulators and create new emulator which is fast compare to other old emulators.
As far as I know, all emulators like Xamarin Android Player, Genymotion, Nox, BlueStacks, ... using x86-based system images because they are about 10 times faster than ARM-based system images.
if it's not necessary to use ARM-based system image you can use another emulator like Genymotion or Xamarin Android Player or Nox (I prefer to use Nox) but if you need an ARM-based emulator try enabling Snapshot or Use of host GPU when creating a new Virtual Device to get faster operation.
I've created simulator for S4 as described in https://stackoverflow.com/a/16646536/206809.
My PC configuration is Core i5 2.5 GHz and 8GB RAM 64Bit Windows 8 still I'm unable to load the emulator. Are you able to run the same ? Please suggest if I'll require higher config. Attached my Emulator Config for reference
When I'm running same it stuck in this screen for a long and then time out.
tick "Use Host GPU" and try. Some times it may work.
Not sure.
Try this one:
I have opened successfully s4 emulator and it's working fine. I think you should reduce size of RAM, Internal storage, and sdcard of emulator according to your computer RAM example I have 4 GB ram in my pc and I have changed according to it like :
RAM : 512,
Internal Storage : 128,
Sdcard : 256.
and
also reduce screen size of your emulator(in my case I have used 5) should be 5 to 7. More Screen size of emulator takes more time to open.
so according to my knowledge size should be your issue.
hope it will help you.
Emulators have been driving me crazy for long time because they are so slow. I had no problems
using emulators on android 2.3, 2.2 etc. It takes for ever to load an emulator for android 4.0 and above and most for the time it won't even load. The high resolution you try to you use, the less chance for emulator to start.
I run my emulators on windows 7. Anyway, after a long search, i came a cross this link. http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html.
Thanks to intel VM Acceleration for windows. Emulators runs on my laptop in seconds. Its not perfect yet but it does the job. I thought i'd share this, because i wished i knew about it long time ago.
Note: CPU must support one of the following virtualization extensions technologies:
Intel Virtualization Technology (VT, VT-x, vmx) extensions
AMD Virtualization (AMD-V, SVM) extensions (only supported for Linux)
and if it does support VT, remember to enable VT .
The Android emulator is a bit sluggish. For some devices, like the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One, the app runs faster in the actual device than the emulator. This is a problem when testing games and visual effects.
How do you make the emulator run as fast as possible? I've been toying with its parameters but haven't found a configuration that shows a noticeable improvement yet.
Official web page
~50% faster
Windows:
Install "Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM)" => SDK-Manager/Extras
Install "Intel x86 Atom System Images" => SDK-Manager/Android 2.3.3
Go to the Android SDK root folder and navigate to extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager. Execute file IntelHaxm.exe to install. (in Android Studio you can navigate to: Settings -> Android SDK -> SDK Tools -> Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM installer))
Create AVD with "Intel atom x86" CPU/ABI
Run emulator and check in console that HAXM running (open a Command Prompt window and execute the command: sc query intelhaxm)
Also don't forget install this one
P.S. during AVD creation add emulation memory: Hardware/New/Device ram size/set up value 512 or more
Linux:
Install KVM: open GOOGLE, write "kvm installation "
Create AVD with "Intel atom x86" CPU/ABI
Run from command line: emulator -avd avd_name -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm
Or run from Eclipse: Run/Run Configurations/Tab "Target" - > check Intel x86 AVD and in "Additional Emulator Command Line Options" window add: -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm (click Run)
P.S. For Fedora, for Ubuntu
OS-X:
In Android SDK Manager, install Intel x86 Atom System Image
In Android SDK Manager, install Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM)
In finder, go to the install location of the Intel Emulator Accelerator and install IntelHAXM (open the dmg and run the installation). You can find the location by placing your mouse over the Emulator Accelerator entry in the SDK Manager.
Create or update an AVD and specify Intel Atom x86 as the CPU.
P.S: Check this tool, very convenient even trial
UPDATE: Now that an Intel x86 image is available, the best answer is by zest above.
As CommonsWare has correctly pointed out, the emulator is slow because it emulates an ARM CPU, which requires translation to Intel opcodes. This virtualization chews up CPU.
To make the emulator faster, you have to give it more CPU. Start with a fast CPU or upgrade if you can.
Then, give the emulator more of the CPU you have:
Disable Hyperthreading - Since the emulator doesn't appear to utilize more than one core, hyperthreading actually reduces the amount of overall CPU time the emulator will get. Disabling HT will slow down apps that take advantage of multiple CPUs. Hyperthreading must be disabled in your BIOS.
Make the emulator run on a CPU other than CPU 0 - This has a much smaller impact than turning off HT, but it helps some. On Windows, you can specify which CPU a process will run on. Many apps will chew up CPU 0, and by default the emulator runs on CPU 0. I change the emulator to run on the last one. Note that on OS X you cannot set affinity (see: https://superuser.com/questions/149312/how-to-set-processor-affinity-on-a-mac).
I'm seeing somewhere around a 50% improvement with these two changes in place.
To set processor affinity on Windows 7:
Open Task Manager
Click View All Processes (to run as administrator, otherwise you can't set processor affinity)
Right click on emulator.exe and choose Set Affinity...
On the Set Affinity dialog, select just the last CPU
Note: When you change affinity in this way, it's only changed for the lifetime of the process. Next start, you have to do it again.
I would like to suggest giving Genymotion a spin. It runs in Oracle's VirtualBox, and will legitimately hit 60 fps on a moderate system.
Here's a screencap from one of my workshops, running on a low-end 2012 model MacBook Air:
If you can't read the text, it's a Nexus 7 emulator running at 56.6 fps. The additional (big!) bonus is that Google Play and Google Play Services come packaged with the virtual machines.
(The source of the demoed animation can be found here.)
Enable GPU Hardware Acceleration (in addition to Intel's HAXM), if you are using API 15 v3 or newer and SDK Tools v17+. Graphics acceleration for the emulator takes advantage of your development computer's graphics hardware, specifically its graphics processing unit (GPU), to make screen drawing faster. This gives a noticeable boost in speed.
To enable graphics acceleration enabled by default on your emulator: when creating the AVD, in the Hardware section, click New, select GPU emulation and set the value to Yes.
To enable acceleration only at runtime: use the -gpu flag while starting the emulator like this:
emulator -avd <avd_name> -gpu on
Source: Google's Using the Emulator tutorial.
Edit Although using the Intel images gets some performance gains, the performance gained by using Genymotion is much greater. See Paul Lammertsma's answer.
Previous Answer
With ADT rev 17 the emulator supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X. This has a noticeable impact on performance.
ADT rev 17 notes:
http://android-developers.blogspot.jp/2012/03/updated-sdk-tools-and-adt-revision-17.html
Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#accel-vm
I recently switched from a core 2 # 2.5 with 3gb of ram to an i7 # 1.73 with 8gb ram (both systems ran Ubuntu 10.10) and the emulator runs at least twice as fast now. Throwing more hardware at it certainly does help.
Just wanted to say that after I installed the Intel HAXM accelerator and use the Intel Atom image the emulator seems to run 50 times faster. The difference is amazing, check it out!
http://www.developer.com/ws/android/development-tools/haxm-speeds-up-the-android-emulator.html
I noticed that the emulator defaults to only Core 0, where most Windows applications will default to "any" core. Also, if you put it on another core (like the last core), it may make the emulator go crazy. If you can, you can try putting your heavy-CPU usage applications on the other CPU cores for a boost in speed.
Hardware-wise, get the fastest CPU you can get that works for single-core applications. More than 2 cores might not experience a huge difference in terms of emulator performance.
Eclipse + the Android emulator together eat up a ton of RAM. I would recommend 3 gigs of RAM at least because I used a system with 2 gigs of RAM, and it slowed down because the system ran out of RAM and started to use the page file.
I feel that the best CPUs for it will probably have a high clock (only use clock as a measure for CPUs in the same series btw), handle non-SIMD operations well, and have a turbo boost mechanism. There aren't many Java-based benchmarks, but overall look for application benchmarks like compression and office. Don't look at gaming or media since those are affected greatly by SIMD. If you find a Java one, even better.
On this year google I/O (2011), Google demonstrated a faster emulator. The problem is not so much on the byte code between ARM and x86 but the software rendering performed by QEMU. They bypass the rendering of QEMU and send the rendering directly to an X server I believe. They showed a car game with really good performace and fps.
I wonder when that will be available for developers...
Google recently announced a new emulator for Android. It's a much faster and better than the old one. You can find more info about it here.
choose a low resolution emulator (eg: Nexus S) if you don't have a good graphic card (like me)
I think it is because clr virtual machine uses cpu directly without code opcode translation.
It may be optimization for clr application or may be windows mobile/window phone 7 started on INTEL proccessor.
Android platform based on linux and theoretically you can start android on virtual machine in i686 environment. In this case virtual machines such as vmware could execute some opcodes direcly. But this option will be allowed only if you write on the Java. Because the Java interpret their byte-code or precompile it before execution.
see:
http://www.taranfx.com/how-to-run-google-android-in-virtualbox-vmware-on-netbooks
Thank you #zest! Worked like a charm. Some things of note: Need to apply Intel's hotfix for the HAXM to deal with kernel panic issue: http://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager
Also, note, if you have more than one abi, you need to uninstall one due to a bug in the latest version of the Android API (r19): https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=66740 (remove armeabi-v7a in this case, since you want the x86 abi). Other than the 45-minutes it took me to resolve these, it was an very rewarding exercise in terms of the increased performance of the emulator.
You could also try the Visual Studio Android Emulator, which can also be installed as a standalone emulator (you don't need Visual Studio). Please note, that it can be installed only on Windows Pro or higher systems.
Use Genymotion instead of emulator. Genymotion has better performance
https://www.genymotion.com
Enabling this option worked for me.
AVD Manager -> Select device and click Edit-> Enable the option 'Use Host GPU'
I've been using the Intel(86) CPU/ABI. I created another emulator using the ARM(armeabi-v7a) and i found quite an improvement with the speed. I'm using platform 4.1.2 API level 16
Update your current Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 And also update system images.
Android Studio 2.0 emulator runs ~3x faster than Android’s previous emulator, and with ADB enhancements you can now push apps and data 10x faster to the emulator than to a physical device. Like a physical device, the official Android emulator also includes Google Play Services built-in, so you can test out more API functionality. Finally, the new emulator has rich new features to manage calls, battery, network, GPS, and more.
Well question is from 2011 and I am answering in 2022 the best answer in my experience is to start emulator from command in that way the emulator starts a dedicated process and not a sub process of android studio. If the process is independent then it will be able to use the GPU properly and can utilize all resources unlike starting emulator from device manager.
You can create AVD from device manager and start is from the avd folder below is the way to start the emulator independently.
How to open emulator command line