I am using the Android version 4.0.3 on a Windows system. My emulator was working pretty well, however all of sudden it became very slow.
It is taking too much time in launching so most of the time launch gets cancelled or I have to start the emulator ahead of time.
If you are having long times in emulator startup, you can configure AVD to save a snapshot of emulator. This significantly improves startup time, although the shutdown time will increase due to the saving of snapshot.
If you are having a slow emulator in general (booting and running programs), and, if you are using a Intel x86 processor you can install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager from android SDK. This will improve emulator speed by more then 10 times compared to the standard emulator. It even faster then a mid range real device.
good luck.
The emulators, all of them, on every platform, are infamous for slow startups. Typically you start the emulator, wait 'til it is all the way up, and then run your program. Debugging on a real device is infinitely preferable.
Leaving the emulator open between program runs is a necessity.
One of my professors gave up and spent several thousand dollars on a new computer with a huge solid-state drive because he could not get an emulator window up in less than five minutes, and it was impacting his ability to teach courses based on the platform. I went the cheaper route and dropped $200 on a tablet. Either way, hardware is the real answer here.
Related
Everywhere I look I can only find questions about how slow the emulator is.
I'm running my app on a real android device. The app has several short animations and totals around 63MB storage. I understand that the more space the app uses the longer the installation will take, but it still takes 3 to 4 minutes to install and run every time.
I'm debugging through USB 2.0 and would expect far better transfer speeds.
I also tried copying a video from my android device to my computer (also via USB), which also took up about 60MB of space, and it took over a minute -- I seemed to get about 1MB/s upload speed.
Are these speeds expected, or should they be faster?
I'm on the learning stage of android and I have to run/debug my application in emulator very often. The thing is that between I press the debug button and until the application gets started on the emulator I have to wait 1-2 minutes.
Is this normal? My PC is a i5 with 8GB RAM.
The emulator is certainly not fast, but one thing you should do is to make sure you don't close the emulator. Leave it running, and then most of the initial startup time will be taken care of. The emulator is a real emulator (unlike the iOS simulator). Think of the startup time of the emulator as booting up your phone. You're not going to turn off and turn on your phone every time you want to use an app, so similarly with the emulator, just leave it on.
It’s not normal, but it’s as expected. The Android emulator continues to be very slow and basically unusable for development. You’re better off developing on a real device. (Deployment to real device is much faster with Android IDE than it is on Xcode/iOS.)
Google has stated that it is a known issue, but it’s not known if/when it actually will get fixed.
I have experienced startup times of 5-10 minutes for the emulator to start up. The startup time to start debugging your application is going to depend on the size of your application. It has to tranfser the .apk over each time you want to debug. If your application is full of large files this can be a long time. One time I put a video in my res/raw folder and it brought my application to 25 mb. This ended up taking around 5 minutes to start debugging.
My PC is core i-5 with 4gb RAM.
whenever i try to run an AVD in eclipse it comes fast, if i want to run an AVD for TAB it take 5 to 10 minutes. Is there any way to make it fast? Also some time it comes with blackscreen says open gl es API problem type something
Also after fast run, i dont close it, i use it same AVD for all run. But it becames slower after every installation or run by my app. so i have to close and restart my AVD, is there any solution for it. Also some time DDMS cant find AVD, while it was running in font.
Anyone face these problem? any tricks?
one another thing, some time app dont run automatically after installation, i have to select app in AVD's APPS
The Android emulator does not make use of multiple cores. Whether you have 1 or 8 cores doesn't matter. However, the speed of a single core does affect the speed of the emulator.
Having a processor with TurboBoost helps considerably, in my experience. Additionally, it is well known that the 3.X and above emulators are extremely slow by nature.
You could also try allocating more RAM to the AVD in it's setup. Reducing the screen size and resolution also helps in speeding up the emulator.
You can refer to this Google Group thread for details on why the emulator is slow, and how to speed it up.
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...
I am using the Android Emulator to debug my application, first off it is ridiculously slow, I mean like 15mins to load slow and on top of it, my Alarm Clock application fails?
Am I the only one, or do other people experience this? Is there a fix or will I just have to go cook steaks while the emulator is booting?
EDIT: I am running it on a Vista laptop, which as fixxed describe does not work well with the alarm clock failing, but I don't think it could be my laptop, its 2GB RAM Intel Dual CPU T2390 1.87GHz, its not even a year old. Could it be that I am creating new AVD's each time I run the emulator?
Anthony
You never mentioned what environment you're running in. Is it perhaps Vista? We had a discussion recently and it seems like the combination of the emulator and Vista just doesn't want to run well for some reason.
Either way something's definitely wrong. I have a laptop with a 2GHz Core2-Duo w/ 4GB RAM (rarely use more than 1.5) running Ubuntu 9.04 (32bit) and the emulator gets to a usable state in less than 30 seconds w/ Eclipse, Firefox, etc all eating more than their share of resources.
The very first time you launch the emulator on a new AVD, it will take a lot longer to start up, because it is creating copies of disk images and customizing them for the hardware parameters you specified.
Beyond that, you may need a faster PC. Android supplies an emulator -- you are running actual ARM opcodes in a virtualized phone. Converting and interpreting opcodes on the fly takes a fair bit of horsepower in terms of CPU and RAM, on top of any other tools you might use (e.g., Eclipse, which needs a ton of resources in its own right).
On a Pentium M 2.0 notebook with 2GB RAM and no Eclipse, in either XP or Linux, the emulator will start in maybe 90 seconds and will run tolerably well.
On a dual- or quad-core CPU with 2.5GHz or better speed, with 4GB RAM and no Eclipse, in either Vista or Linux, the emulator will start in under a minute and will run rather nicely.
I see the Alarm clock crashing problem in on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. 2.4 GHz , 4GB RAM.
My development environment is: Eclipse 3.4.2, Using Android 1.6 SDK
The emulator takes about 2 minutes for me to start up. I think even 2 minutes is too slow. The iPhone simulator takes only a few seconds.
Are you deleting the old avds that you have created?.....If not then it will slow up your computer as i tried it with different target machines......Is it necessary to create new avds every time you are trying to run the emulator?...If not i'll suggest you to stick with an avd(or delete the old ones).Hope this helps.