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
Related
Check out my PC stats:
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.
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
I'm developing an android application, since there are many assets, the generated apk is near 10M. Now deploying it to a simulator is very slow, often takes me 3 or 4 minutes, which is unacceptable.
I've used Robolectric to test most of the logic, which is very fast. But sometimes I still need to use emulator(e.g. adjust the UI), which waste me a lot of time.
Is there any way to make it fast?
This is my experience, too. Debugging with the software emulator is very slow.
It is much faster to use a real device in debug mode. However, you may run in other limitations
Well since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alterante testing Emulator, I'll also present my favorite. This might not be an alternative for everyone but for me it's perfect! Use the Bluestacks Player. It runs Android 2.3.4 and is very fluent and fast. Sometimes even faster than a normal device. The only downsize is, that you can just test Apps on the API Level 10 and just on one screen size, but it's perfect just for testing if it's working or not. Just connect the Player with the adb by running
adb connect 127.0.0.1
After compiling it installs instantly. Very impressive, considering I have a rather average computer hardware(dual core with 4 GB of RAM)
I've found android-x86 image on VirtualBox many times faster for deployment than an emulator running on same machine, sometimes even faster than a USB device.
EDIT
Please use the android image provided by vmlite, not the one provided by android-x86, and refer to this important question: How to change the screen size of vmlite android?
Actually, I absolutly never use the Emulator, which is way too slow in every situations.
I test and debug my apps directly on real devices (and use the ADB screenshot features when I have to pixel-check some screens..)
Hope this helps...
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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.
Is there a way to make the emulator work correctly ? it is extremly slow and there is really no way to debug application this way.
Anyone experiencing this ?
Note : This is for the android 3.x platform of the SDK.
Thanks.
Everyone is experiencing this issue, even who have Intel i7 with 16 gb of ram...
The problem is that the biggest resolution (mostly 1280x800) have killed the emulator performance...
At the last google I/O some kind of hardware acceleration was shown, but it's in early stage of development I think.. But the performance were way better.
Today the only solution to develop on Honeycomb is to buy a real tablet..
The Android Emulator is slow with every OS version (but Google is working on it). Also, if you're running the Emulator on an already slow system, this slows it down, too.
If you're getting any errors, feel free to post the outputted error-messages. Otherwise I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the performance-issues are solved.