Improving speed on Android Emulator - android

Hello I am running a W510 Lenovo Laptop which is generally rapid in most computing circumstances but when running Eclipse and trying to run the AVD emulator it is like molasses. I know that there are some alternative emulators and that I can improve the RAM on the emulator but what other ways can I speed it up.
I am thinking of upgrading from 4GB of RAM on my Lenovo to 12GB would this make a big difference?
Thanks

If you have a dedicated GPU, try turning GPU acceleration on to significantly boost graphics performance. It is turned off by default. To turn it on, edit the AVD you use, and on the hardware section, click "New". Find "GPU emulation", add it, and set the value to yes.
Assuming that you only run eclipse, the emulator, and a bunch of Chrome tabs (no other RAM hungry processes going on), 4GB should be enough. My setup also has 4GB RAM with no swap space and if you check system monitor, most likely you still have spare free RAM. I personally still have 800 MB of free RAM when all of those things are open (with device ram size set to 512 MB).

Hope this may work for others:
I've faced the same problem with my high config pc have 3i 4GB , but the emulator works so slow
I found something that worked for me and hope it may work for others i would love to share it here
i've just added Device ram size to My existing AVD and set the size to 1000MB(Because i've enough to allot mine is 6GB)
No the speed of my AVD was ultimate hope it may help you.
EDIT 1:
You may also set some attribute for better performance like
set GPU Emulation = yes

Related

Low FPS on Android emulator

First of all, you need to know that I have a very powerful computer so that's not the problem.
I tried making a black screen without anything on it but an FPS counter, with OpenGL and Canvas, but the app doesn't go over 10-11 FPS.
I am just lost, I don't know what the problem is, I checked and it's not the render or the update function...
thanks for the help.
I am on windows 7 64 bit BTW.
8 years later and i have the answer.
open the AVD manager, scroll down to emulated performance, change it from "Automatic" to "Hardware - GLES 2.0", if still not performing show the advanced settings and set it to "Cold boot" this changed it from like 8-12 fps to a solid 30 fps non stop.
I'm more inclined to say that it is a fault of the Emulator than your system. It is extremely slow for me as well, even doing general app debugging. Not surprised on your frame rate. The Intel x86 Image might make a difference, but I usually don't see much improvement even with that.
You can create x86 virtual machine.
See
Android-x86 - Porting Android to x86
ISO image
I've found that I get better performance out of the Emulator when I set the processor afinity to all through Windows Task Manager
Here are some tips which can speed up the emulator significantly :
Give 1GB of RAM (or even more) to your AVD. Don't try to emulate the amount of RAM of a real device, it is generally useless and can amazingly slow down the emulator.
Emulate Android 2.3.3, which boots and runs faster on the emulator than the previous and next versions (by the way, never emulate Android 2.1 or 2.2 if you use SQLite databases. The SQLite implementation was very slow even on real devices).
Don't use high screen resolutions and densities unless for final testing. Use the smallest resolution available and set the LCD density to something low (in the mdpi range).
Well, 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
(Its always the same IP adress)

android tablet emulator not starting with 1024 ram size

To increase performance, I want to allocate 1024 MB RAM to a tablet emulator. Problem is that it won't start, i.e. no windows/consoles show up when I click Start in the Virtual Device Manager. If I let the device to its default 256 MB, it starts. How can I fix this?
I'm using Windows 7 Ultimate with Intel i7-2.2 GHz and 8 GB RAM DDR3. It used to work fine on 32-bit windows.
I know this isn't an answer to the particular question you have asked, but it may help with the underlying issue: you can increase the performance of your emulated device by switching to an x86 version.
The Android emulator has always been painfully slow for me, even on a quad core rig with 8 gigs of RAM, so I started following the Android x86 project. Not long ago, I finally took the plunge into getting it set up, and it was easier than I expected--and it's really, really fast.
If you have VirtualBox installed, all you have to do is download eeepc.iso from the project's website (for whichever Android version you prefer), create a VM for it in VirtualBox with however much RAM you want it to have, and boot it up. Pick VESA mode from the menu, disable mouse integration on the VM, and skip the google account login process. You'll be good to go.
Then just set up port forwarding for ADB from guest:5555 to localhost:whatever-port-you-choose, and point ADB at localhost:whatever-port-you-choose, and it'll work even better than the ARM emulator that ships with the SDK.
I disabled the camera support and I was able to use 1024MB of RAM.

Why can't I boot an AVD from Eclipse with 1024 MB of RAM?

So, like a lot of people starting Android development with Eclipse, even with a fast machine, I notice that the emulator runs frustratingly slow.
I search SO for any tips to make it run faster and I run across this question, whose top answer suggests a couple of things, including making the AVD have more RAM. They suggest 1024MB:
Sounds good. But when I try to launch it, I get this:
Failed to allocate memory: 8
This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.
If I set it to 512MB (up from the default 256MB) it launches fine.
But why, on a Windows 7 x64 machine with 12GB of physical RAM can I not allocate 1024MB to an AVD? Is it an Eclipse limitation? Emulator limitation? Java limitation? I presume the person in that other question got it working but I've yet to figure out how and most of the responses I see elsewhere say "yeah dial it down to 512MB" which is not the answer I'm looking for.
From Galaxy s3 emulator:
There is a common problem when setting up the AVD that you have to manually edit the config file to fix. File is located at C:\Documents and Settings\username\.android\avd\name_of_avd.avd\config.ini
Change the memory settings from
hw.ramSize=1024
to
hw.ramSize=1024MB
(Do not enable word wrap in notepad).
Save the file and reopen the avd.
This worked for me.
Weird, but this worked for me on Windows 7 x64 machine with 16GB of RAM. You do have to add MB at the end of "hw.ramSize" in config.ini.
I had the same problem like OP wrote. Also, if you need 2 gigabytes of RAM, write 2048MB and simulator will run from Eclipse.
I have the same problem occasionally, and I'm unable to tell you exactly why this problem occurs, but it seems that the AVD won't start if it has been allocated more then an X percentage of your available RAM at the time of starting.
If you lower the given amount by just 50mb, you'll often notice it will run just fine. Or, similarly, if you close a few programs to save some RAM, it will also boot up perfectly fine.
I know it's not ideal, but I suggest to just lower the allocated RAM in small amounts until it boots up. I wish I could give a better answer but I haven't been able to find a reason myself either.
Try starting the AVD without Eclipse to remove that Factor.
This can be done by navigating to your SDK-Path/tools and open Android(.bat?) and then select the AVD manager.
I would recommend opening a command shell, navigating to the path and then run
emulator -avd AVDNAME -scale 0.7 -no-boot-anim
You can also try starting it without the scale parameter or maybe even a lower number.
On Windows, emulating RAM greater than 768 may fail depending on the system load
Open C:\Users\your user.android\avd\yourAVD.avd\config.ini
change
hw.ramSize=1024
to
hw.ramSize=1024M
this worked for me :-)
hope it will help!

Android emulator is very very slow

My laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GHz, 1GB RAM.
I created a target with SD Card 512MB, Device RAM size 512, snapshot enabled. I waited for 30 minutes but the emulator doesn't ends up loading. It keeps showing a flash word "Android" on the black screen.
Before running the emulator, I closed most other programs.
What's wrong with it? This is very frustrating. :(
What is your CPU and RAM usage during startup? Do you have a lot of IO swapping occurring? Considering that Windows needs at least 512 to run right half of the time and Eclipse is a memory hog you probably just need more RAM.
It shouldn't take more than 5-10min at most to build the emulator on initial startup. The SD card size has no effect on memory usage, it's not loaded into memory, it just creates a larger image file for the sdcard. Setting the emulator to have 256mb of ram will help, but in general when I have the same problem I just close down the emulator window and re-start it. Sometimes it just gets hung-up on creation and isn't a memory issue (I have 16gb of ram and still have the problem from time to time)
You're assigning the emulated Android instance half of the physical memory on your machine. Get more memory.
Emulator is in general very slow, and the higher the OS version on the emulator, the slower it gets. I'm a game developer, and with my AMD Athlon X3 2.90 GHz with 4GB RAM it gives me 5-6 fps. I tried to open one of my apps on Honeycomb emulator, and it was really terrible. It opened, but I couldn't do anything with it. So the best answer is purchasing a real device.
I've experienced the same thing and in my case I had to set "Min SDK Version" when creating the project in Eclipse. Without this setting the emulator didn't start.
Android Development Tools (ADT) 9.0.0 (or later) has a feature that allows you to save state of the AVD (emulator), and you can start your emulator instantly. You have to enable this feature while creating a new AVD or you can just create it later by editing the AVD.
Also I have increased the Device RAM Size to 1024 which results in a very fast emulator.
Refer the given below screenshots for more information.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to
Speed up your Android Emulator!:
The native Android emulator is really slow. It's much faster if you use Android on a virtual machine. You can follow my detailed guide on setting it up. http://www.bobbychanblog.com/2011/07/faster-android-emulator-alternative-using-virtualbox/

Performance of the Android Virtual Device

The Android virtual device (a simulated Android environment) doesn't run very smoothly on my machine. Scrolling is quite sluggish.
Is that normal?
EDIT: Just noticed that a AVD running Android 1.6 has a significantly better performance compared to the AVDs running on 2.1 and 2.2.
Its normal unless you have like 4GB of RAM, an SSD, and a good processor. Out of all those, RAM is probably the most important though since your basically running a VM(Virtual Machine) on a VM.
If you have a dedicated GPU on your machine, you can enable GPU acceleration on the AVD to make the graphics-related processing, such as animations etc, much faster. It is NOT enabled by default, and the developers page even said that it might not be compatible with every GPU out there, but it is worth a try. You can enable it by editing your AVD, and in the hardware section click "New", add "GPU emulation", and set it to "yes".
This is also assuming you have enough RAM. 4GB is sufficient to run eclipse + the Jellybean AVD (with WXGA720 resolution) on Ubuntu 12.04 Unity. I still have 800 MB of free RAM (I do not have swap space).

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