Android 4.0.3 not getting boot in AVD

Android 4.0.3 not getting boot in AVD - android

I'm newbee to Android. I have set up all things in the android site to run Hello world program. I've installed the latest platform Android 4.0.3.. I've created an AVD and when I tried to start the avd, a screen showing ANDROID runs. I've been waiting for more than 2 hours to get the menu in the avd, but nothing worked up.. Can anyone help me out to find the problem??
[Note: I'm using Pentium 4 processor running in windows XP]

you must have install X86 atom emulator...
which requires haxm(hardware accelerated execution manager) which requires intel vt supported processors, and pentium 4 does not support virtual technology.
so either try using another emulator or change your processor.....
check installation instruction for haxm here
and check your processor capabilty here

4.0.3 usually takes a long time to boot for me as well, running on 4 GB RAM on Core i5. I would recommend working with a lower version such as 2.3.3 (which mobiles support as well). But here are a few general steps to make avd run faster (assuming you are using Eclipse):
Run > Run Configurations > Target. Check the "disable boot animations" and in the additional options, specify "-scale 0.5".
Enable snapshots. This allows you to save the running emulator and instantly load it at a later time (so you only have to boot up once).
Go to AVD editor and edit the AVD. Check the "Snapshot Enabled" check box.

Well just restart your eclipse. If the praoblem persists then check if you have provided any virtual sdcard file with right permission.

Related

Why Android Studio arm64 system images are slow? [duplicate]

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I have got a 2.67  GHz Celeron processor, and 1.21  GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine.
My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me, it doesn't. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?
Even if it starts and loads the home screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3.5 (Galileo) and 3.4 (Ganymede).

Update
You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator. That will save emulator state, and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot.
Click on Emulator edit button, then click Show Advanced Setting. Then enable Quick Boot like below screenshot.
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 to the given below screenshots for more information.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:
Using ssd hard drive has too much impact and I recommend to use more suitable ram (8 or higher)

IMPORTANT NOTE: Please first refer to the Intel list about VT to make sure your CPU supports Intel VT.
HAXM Speeds Up the Slow Android Emulator
HAXM stands for - "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager"
Currently, it supports only Intel® VT (Intel Virtualization Technology).
The Android emulator is based on QEMU. The interface between QEMU and the HAXM driver on the host system is designed to be vendor-agnostic.
Steps for Configuring Your Android Development Environment for HAXM
Update Eclipse:
Make sure your Eclipse installation and the ADT plug-in are fully up-to-date.
Update your Android Tools:
After each Eclipse plug-in update, it is important to update your Android SDK Tools. To do this, launch the Android SDK Manager and update all the Android SDK components. To take advantage of HAXM, you must be on at least release version 17.
Download the x86 Atom System Images and the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager Driver. Follow the image below:
Install the HAXM Driver by running "IntelHaxm.exe". It will be located in one of the following locations:
C:\Program
Files\Android\android-sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
C:\Users\<user>\adt-bundle-windows-x86_64\sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
If the installer fails with the message that Intel VT must be turned on, you need to enable this in the BIOS. See the description for how to do this in Enabling Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) .
Create a new x86 AVD: Follow the image below:
Or as for new SDK,

Try Android x86. It's much faster than the Google Android emulator. Follow these steps:
Install VirtualBox.
Download the ISO file that you need.
Create a virtual machine as Linux 2.6/Other Linux, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 GB. Network: PCnet-Fast III, attached to NAT. You can also use a bridged adapter, but you need a DHCP server in your environment.
Install Android x86 on the emulator, run it.
Press Alt+F1, type netcfg, remember the IP address, press Alt+F7.
Run cmd on your Windows XP system, change the directory to your Android tools directory, type adb connect <virtual_machine_IP>.
Start Eclipse, open the ADT plugin, find the device, and enjoy!

UPDATE: The latest version of Android studio (2.x) made major improvements to the bundled emulator. It's responsive and has a whole bunch of features.
For those still interested:
Try using Genymotion. You can download a version for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux after registering. A plugin for Eclipse is also available:
The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to "Help / Install New Software" menu, then just add a new Update Site with the following URL: http://plugins.genymotion.com/eclipse. Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse.
This emulator is fast and responsive.
GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level, signal strength, and GPS. The latest version now also contains camera tools.

The emulator included in your (old) version of Eclipse is very slow.
Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010. Update your SDK/IDE.
Personally, I use a real phone to do my tests. It is faster and tests are more realistic. But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don't want to buy several phones, you will have to use the emulator from time to time.

The startup of the emulator is very slow. The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once. If the emulator is already running and you run your app again, the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly. Of course, if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone, it is best to test it on a real phone.

Intel released recommended installation instructions for the ICS emulator on May 15, 2012. This worked for me. The emulator is now fast and the UI is smooth.
The first half of the instructions are detailed enough, so I will assume you were able to install the Intel x86 Atom System Image(s) using the Android SDK manager, as well as Intel HAXM.
Now to ensure that everything else is set up so you can enjoy a highly performing emulator:
Install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM)
And start it:
sudo kextload -b com.intel.kext.intelhaxm (mac)
If HAXM is working properly, you may see this message when launching the emulator:
HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virtual mode
Otherwise, you may see this error:
HAX is not working and the emulator runs in emulation mode emulator:
Failed to open the hax module
Use GPU emulation. You cannot use the Snapshot option when using GPU emulation as of this writing. Ensure that GPU emulation is set to "yes".
Set the device memory to 1024 MB or more, but not more than the Intel HAXM setting. I use 1024 MB per device and 2048 for HAXM.
Always double-check the settings after saving! The emulator is very picky about what it allows you to set, and it will revert configurations without telling you.
With these settings the software keyboard no longer appears, nor do the on-screen back, menu, and recent keys. This appears to be a limitation of the current ICS Intel x86 system image. You will need to use the keyboard shortcuts.
On Mac OS you will need to hold fn + control for the F1 - F12 keys to work. Page up/down/left/right can be performed using control + arrow keys.

You can create emulator.bat with following command to start the emulator. It will start faster.
emulator.exe -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>
Or on Unix (Mac or Linux flavors):
emulator -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>

I've noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there's no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) connected. So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager "SDK Setup.exe" and Eclipse is not started, the emulator works faster.
If you start the emulator from Eclipse: DDMS is there, so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow, but sometimes it's faster.

Emulators are slow. There's really nothing you can do about it, but there are alternatives to the emulator.
Genymotion - Preferred
VirtualBox
BlueStacks
YouWave
Windows Android Emulator
Jar of Beans
Andy
To make your emulator faster, you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version (Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)).
Developing on a Mac would be better. Why use an emulator, BTW? Using a real phone makes more sense.

As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools, the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency. The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#acceleration
For enabling GPU aceleration, run the emulator from the command line or add "-gpu on" to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration.
emulator -avd <avd_name> -gpu on
For using the CPU machine extensions, you have to install the driver (caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers). Once it's installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD.

Try to disable your antivirus. Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster.

Android SDK rev. 17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies.
This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot!
See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details: Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration
Don't forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system:
Configuring VM Acceleration on Windows
Configuring VM Acceleration on Mac
Configuring VM Acceleration on Linux
After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image (as described in the documentation) you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image:
For example:
Target: Intel Atom x86 System Image - API Level 10
CPU/ABI: Intel Atom (x86)

The option -cpu-delay <delay> described in Emulator Startup Options can help.

The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle. This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses. As a workaround, I pass -icount auto to QEMU when starting the emulator. You can make a batch file called my_avd.bat to do it for you:
emulator #my_avd -no-boot-anim -qemu -icount auto
#my_avd -- launch a virtual device named 'my_avd'
-no-boot-anim -- disable animation for faster boot
-qemu args... -- pass arguments to qemu
-icount [N|auto] -- enable virtual instruction counter with 2^N clock ticks per instruction
This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install tenfold.

Android emulator release 9 has a new "snapshot" feature. You can save the state of the emulator (make an image of the emulator) and avoid booting when you start the emulator.

You can review the emulator issues on the Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools talk, starting a 0:40:20.
The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well.
The main choking point is rendering since it's not running on any dedicated hardware but it's actually being performed through software rendering. Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance. Getting more/faster memory isn't going to help.
They've mentioned, at the time, that they're developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware, so eventually, you'll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware.

The current (May 2011) version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL -- this means that the GL code gets translated into software (ARM software, in fact) which then gets emulated in software in QEMU. This is crazy-slow. They're working on this problem and have it partially solved, but not with any sort of release quality.
Check out the video Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools to see it in action -- jump to about 44 minutes.

Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator
First, install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM). This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager. In the SDK Manager, it's located under Extras.
In the version of Android Studio I used (0.8.9), Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn't actually run the installer (I assume this will be fixed in later releases). To run the installer I had to go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-studio\sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and manually launch intelhaxm.exe.
HAXM works with Intel devices, so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU.
Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86
This improved things considerably, but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish. The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD).
After these changes, Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag.
Be aware that these features are hardware dependent (CPU/GPU) and may not work on some systems.

Try Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.

To add further information to this.
I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) which in turn updated my Java version to:
Java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode)
And now the emulator (although takes a while to start) seems to be running faster than previously.
It might be worth people upgrading their JVM.

A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android--it's fast, Hyper-V, x86, and free to download even without VS.

Here's what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all.
Assign all available processors to the emulator
Here's what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time. I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. I set it to use all available processors.
I'm using Windows 7.
When the Android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for "emulator-arm.exe" or "emulator-arm.exe *32"... Right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.

After developing for a while, my emulator became brutally slow. I chose wipe user data, and it was much much better. I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you've deployed.

Well, since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative 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 fluid and fast. Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device. The only downside 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. It is very impressive, considering I have rather an average computer hardware (dual core with 4 GB of RAM).

I had intermittent slow emulator (SDK v8.0) load times, up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10.04 VirtualBox 3.2.12 guest with Eclipse (3.6.1) loaded. I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 MB to 2048 MB and from that point on, I never experienced the slowness again (load times consistent at 33 seconds, CPU load consistent at 20%). Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs.

Android emulator is dead slow. It takes 800MB memory while running.
If you are on Windows, You can use Microsoft Android Emulator. It is superb, provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator. And most important it is fast ( consumes 13MB only).
It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview. I am using it and happy with it. I downloaded and installed entire VS pack, I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only.
Visual Studio Emulator for Android
EDIT:
Try https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

I noticed that the my emulator (Eclipse plugin) was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings. Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive. It is still slow, but better than it used to be.

To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the "Disable Boot Animation" before starting the emulator. Refer to the Android documentation.
If in case you don't know, you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run/debug your app. If you click run/debug when it's already open, your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time.
Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%.

Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 version and then go to app open Settings/Preferences, the go to Build, Execution, Deployment → Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant Run. And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run.
And Instant run will look like this
However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now.

Is it possible to run Android Device Emulator (via Android Studio 2) on VMWare?

I have been running Android Studio 1.5.1 doing development on a WMWare copy of Windows 2012 R2 and everything works fine. I've been able to run the device emulator with no problems and start various versions of Android running in AVD.
Android Studio 2.x Change
I recently installed Android Studio 2.0 (see image below for exact version).
Now when I attempt to run the emulator nothing happens.
Well, actually I do see a message in the status bar of Studio when I attempt to start the device, but then that message disappears and nothing happens after that.
There is a warning that I need to turn off Hyper-V (see image below), but I don't believe that is possible since this is a VM.
No Longer Possible?
Is it not possible to run the emulator on the VM any more?

More recent versions of the Android Emulator require hardware virtualization support (Intel HAXM).
Unfortunately, most virtual machines do not provide HAXM instructions to the guest (a VM within a VM), so you will be unable to use the emulator within the virtual machine.

I just installed Android Studio 2.1 on my Windows 2008 R2 VM (running VMWare) and I'm happy to report that it is possible to run ARM based AVD (Android Virtual Devices) on the VM.
Steps To Run Arm-based Virtual Device on VMWare
Go to location where you've installed the Android SDKs (in my case it is at %appdata%\Android2\SDK\
If you are in the right place you should see a directory structure and directories like the ones shown in the first image below.
Start the AVD.exe by double-clicking it.
You will see a window like the one in the image below
Take a close look and notice that this is running an ARM(armeabi-v71) image. When you download images you have to download ARM-based images. (no x86 images will work on VM).
Also, you cannot start these images from AVD that launches from Android Studio 2.x
Make sure you have an environment variable named ANDROID_SDK_HOME set to path which is similar to the one at the top of the AVD manager (in image).
Once you do all of this and start an ARM-based image on a VMWare VM it will warn you that it is faster with HAXM but at least the image will run.
Finally, you can see if you attempt to launch your Virtual Device from the AVD Manager in Android Studio then it will warn you that Hyper-V needs to be turned off. Of course you cannot turn Hyper-V off on a VM.
EDIT -- Running Android 7 ARM Image
#mcflysoft asked about running an android 7 ARM image. At first I didn't think it worked, but if you open up your SDK manager and install the exact ARM OS image shown in the following picture, it will run on a Windows VM:
ARM image Containing Google APIs
I tried installing the ARM image that contained the Google APIs and that one would not ever start. There were failures logged which I could see in c:\> adb shell logcat.
Beware : It Is Really Slow
However, running Android 7 seems extremely slow and I don't see a web browser.
Not sure how helpful it may be to you, but you can get it working.
Good luck.

The simplest solution I've found so far is to use a device farm, for example Samsung's device farm:
https://developer.samsung.com/remotetestlab/galaxy/rtlDeviceList.action#444
It's free to use and you can deploy your apps just like in an emulator (Right Click -> Test -> Remote Debug Bridge -> follow the instructions).
And since those are real devices, the speed might be even better than on an emulator on your personal PC.

I've had the same problem so I'll post an answer in the hope that someone might find this useful in the future. I can run Android Studio in my VM but when I try to start up an emulator, I can't download an image due to "Your CPU does not support required features (VT-x or SVM)"
Although I didn't get a virtual device up and running, I got round the problem by using BlueStacks. You install BlueStacks on the VM. BlueStacks (at the moment) runs Android 7.1.1, SDK 25. Inside BlueStacks, go to Settings/Preferences and Enable Android Debugger Bridge (adb) following this set of instructions. Then you should be able to run your app on BlueStacks from inside Android Studio. Logcat can see any log statements from BlueStacks.
The alternative (without enabling the debugger bridge) is to locate the .apk file for your app and then open that with BlueStacks APK installer. Logcat still sees the traces.
It's slow on a VM. You also have to set android:testOnly="false" in your XML file

Android: 10inch android emulator is very slow [duplicate]

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I have got a 2.67  GHz Celeron processor, and 1.21  GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine.
My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me, it doesn't. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?
Even if it starts and loads the home screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3.5 (Galileo) and 3.4 (Ganymede).

Update
You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator. That will save emulator state, and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot.
Click on Emulator edit button, then click Show Advanced Setting. Then enable Quick Boot like below screenshot.
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 to the given below screenshots for more information.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:
Using ssd hard drive has too much impact and I recommend to use more suitable ram (8 or higher)

Try Android x86. It's much faster than the Google Android emulator. Follow these steps:
Install VirtualBox.
Download the ISO file that you need.
Create a virtual machine as Linux 2.6/Other Linux, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 GB. Network: PCnet-Fast III, attached to NAT. You can also use a bridged adapter, but you need a DHCP server in your environment.
Install Android x86 on the emulator, run it.
Press Alt+F1, type netcfg, remember the IP address, press Alt+F7.
Run cmd on your Windows XP system, change the directory to your Android tools directory, type adb connect <virtual_machine_IP>.
Start Eclipse, open the ADT plugin, find the device, and enjoy!

UPDATE: The latest version of Android studio (2.x) made major improvements to the bundled emulator. It's responsive and has a whole bunch of features.
For those still interested:
Try using Genymotion. You can download a version for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux after registering. A plugin for Eclipse is also available:
The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to "Help / Install New Software" menu, then just add a new Update Site with the following URL: http://plugins.genymotion.com/eclipse. Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse.
This emulator is fast and responsive.
GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level, signal strength, and GPS. The latest version now also contains camera tools.

The emulator included in your (old) version of Eclipse is very slow.
Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010. Update your SDK/IDE.
Personally, I use a real phone to do my tests. It is faster and tests are more realistic. But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don't want to buy several phones, you will have to use the emulator from time to time.

The startup of the emulator is very slow. The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once. If the emulator is already running and you run your app again, the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly. Of course, if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone, it is best to test it on a real phone.

You can create emulator.bat with following command to start the emulator. It will start faster.
emulator.exe -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>
Or on Unix (Mac or Linux flavors):
emulator -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>

I've noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there's no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) connected. So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager "SDK Setup.exe" and Eclipse is not started, the emulator works faster.
If you start the emulator from Eclipse: DDMS is there, so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow, but sometimes it's faster.

Emulators are slow. There's really nothing you can do about it, but there are alternatives to the emulator.
Genymotion - Preferred
VirtualBox
BlueStacks
YouWave
Windows Android Emulator
Jar of Beans
Andy
To make your emulator faster, you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version (Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)).
Developing on a Mac would be better. Why use an emulator, BTW? Using a real phone makes more sense.

As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools, the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency. The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#acceleration
For enabling GPU aceleration, run the emulator from the command line or add "-gpu on" to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration.
emulator -avd <avd_name> -gpu on
For using the CPU machine extensions, you have to install the driver (caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers). Once it's installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD.

Try to disable your antivirus. Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster.

Android SDK rev. 17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies.
This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot!
See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details: Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration
Don't forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system:
Configuring VM Acceleration on Windows
Configuring VM Acceleration on Mac
Configuring VM Acceleration on Linux
After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image (as described in the documentation) you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image:
For example:
Target: Intel Atom x86 System Image - API Level 10
CPU/ABI: Intel Atom (x86)

The option -cpu-delay <delay> described in Emulator Startup Options can help.

The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle. This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses. As a workaround, I pass -icount auto to QEMU when starting the emulator. You can make a batch file called my_avd.bat to do it for you:
emulator #my_avd -no-boot-anim -qemu -icount auto
#my_avd -- launch a virtual device named 'my_avd'
-no-boot-anim -- disable animation for faster boot
-qemu args... -- pass arguments to qemu
-icount [N|auto] -- enable virtual instruction counter with 2^N clock ticks per instruction
This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install tenfold.

Android emulator release 9 has a new "snapshot" feature. You can save the state of the emulator (make an image of the emulator) and avoid booting when you start the emulator.

You can review the emulator issues on the Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools talk, starting a 0:40:20.
The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well.
The main choking point is rendering since it's not running on any dedicated hardware but it's actually being performed through software rendering. Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance. Getting more/faster memory isn't going to help.
They've mentioned, at the time, that they're developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware, so eventually, you'll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware.

The current (May 2011) version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL -- this means that the GL code gets translated into software (ARM software, in fact) which then gets emulated in software in QEMU. This is crazy-slow. They're working on this problem and have it partially solved, but not with any sort of release quality.
Check out the video Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools to see it in action -- jump to about 44 minutes.

Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator
First, install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM). This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager. In the SDK Manager, it's located under Extras.
In the version of Android Studio I used (0.8.9), Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn't actually run the installer (I assume this will be fixed in later releases). To run the installer I had to go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-studio\sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and manually launch intelhaxm.exe.
HAXM works with Intel devices, so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU.
Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86
This improved things considerably, but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish. The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD).
After these changes, Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag.
Be aware that these features are hardware dependent (CPU/GPU) and may not work on some systems.

Try Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.

To add further information to this.
I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) which in turn updated my Java version to:
Java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode)
And now the emulator (although takes a while to start) seems to be running faster than previously.
It might be worth people upgrading their JVM.

A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android--it's fast, Hyper-V, x86, and free to download even without VS.

Here's what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all.
Assign all available processors to the emulator
Here's what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time. I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. I set it to use all available processors.
I'm using Windows 7.
When the Android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for "emulator-arm.exe" or "emulator-arm.exe *32"... Right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.

After developing for a while, my emulator became brutally slow. I chose wipe user data, and it was much much better. I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you've deployed.

Well, since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative 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 fluid and fast. Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device. The only downside 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. It is very impressive, considering I have rather an average computer hardware (dual core with 4 GB of RAM).

I had intermittent slow emulator (SDK v8.0) load times, up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10.04 VirtualBox 3.2.12 guest with Eclipse (3.6.1) loaded. I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 MB to 2048 MB and from that point on, I never experienced the slowness again (load times consistent at 33 seconds, CPU load consistent at 20%). Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs.

Android emulator is dead slow. It takes 800MB memory while running.
If you are on Windows, You can use Microsoft Android Emulator. It is superb, provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator. And most important it is fast ( consumes 13MB only).
It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview. I am using it and happy with it. I downloaded and installed entire VS pack, I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only.
Visual Studio Emulator for Android
EDIT:
Try https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

I noticed that the my emulator (Eclipse plugin) was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings. Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive. It is still slow, but better than it used to be.

To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the "Disable Boot Animation" before starting the emulator. Refer to the Android documentation.
If in case you don't know, you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run/debug your app. If you click run/debug when it's already open, your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time.
Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%.

Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 version and then go to app open Settings/Preferences, the go to Build, Execution, Deployment → Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant Run. And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run.
And Instant run will look like this
However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now.

Why emulator is very slow in Android Studio?

I just setup Android Studio on my PC, which is new launch to develop Android application.
My problem is that, when I try to run my small app in emulator, it take to much time to launch and after then emulator is working slow too.
AVD settings
AVD Name: Glaxy
Device: Glaxy Nexus (4.65", 720x 1280: xhdpi)
Target: Android 4.2.2 - API Level 17
Memory Option: Ram 500, VM Heap 64
Internal Storage: 200MiB
I have good window pc: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.93Ghz and Ram is 3gb
I am new in Android development and java.

The Best Solution is to use Android Emulator with Intel Virtualization Technology.
Now if your system have a Processor that have a feature called as Intel Virtualization Technology, then Intel X86 images will be huge benefit for you. because it supports Intel® Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (Intel® HAXM).
To check that your processor support HAXM or not : Click Here
You need to manually install the Intel HAXM in your system. Follow these steps for that.
First of all go to - adt -> extras -> intel -> Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
Make sure that Intel Virtualization is enabled from BIOS Settings.
Now install Intel HAXM in your system and select amount of memory(i prefer to set it as default value).
After installation create new Android Virtual Device (AVD) which should have a Target of API Level xx
Now set the CPU/ABI as Intel Atom(x86).
If you are on Windows then do not set RAM value more than 768 MB while setting up an emulator.
Run the emulator. It will be blazing fast then ordinary one.
Hope it will be helpful for you. :) Thanks.

Just edit the AVD settings as below,
Enable snapshot options and please use INTEL HAXM software for speedup.just visit https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager-intel-haxm and download...

I tried all the suggested remedies and none had any impact. The Android Studio emulator experience was simply unusable with my setup (Windows 10, AndroidStudio 3.5, Quadcore 3.2 Ghz, 32GB with SSD drive).
I tried Updating Studio, Installing Intel HAXM, Changing the memory settings via SDK, using an actual device, excluding the various folders from in the Windows Anti-virus among other things.
The solution that made it work like a breeze was to exclude the Android Debug Bridge (adb.exe) "as a process" from the Windows Security / Virus Protection. You can either do it yourself or read the details below to know how to do it.
I suggest verifying the severity of the speed issue yourself. The same will be used to verify the difference immediately after you apply the remedy. Running the options from within Android Studio just makes it more complex.
Steps to check the issue:
Get the path for your Android SDK Tools. You can find it from SDK Manager -> Appearance and Behavior -> System Settings -> Android SDK.
Open a command prompt or terminal window. You can do right click on Windows (Start) Icon -> Run and execute "cmd". This should give you a windows command prompt or terminal window.
In the terminal window, change your drive and path to your Android SDK folder using the CD command. Now change to the sub-folder Platform-tools.
You will find the Android Debug Bridge (adb.exe) in this folder. This plays a very crucial role in operating the emulator as well as the actual device.
In the terminal window, execute the adb.exe tool with the command adb. It should instantly return back with the help parameters for adb.
Now execute adb.exe with a command like - adb devices. This should simply stall and take several seconds to come back with the information even if you have no devices or emulator running. In my setup it took almost 30 seconds. This is the issue.
Anything you do with the emulator goes via adb and gets stuck here. Once the remedy is applied, it should execute the adb devices command as instantly as the simple adb command without any parameter.
Steps to remedy:
Go to Windows "Virus and Threat Protection" setting. There are several ways to reach it. You can use Right Click on Windows (Start) Icon and choose Settings. Choose Update & Security, then Windows Security, then Virus and Threat Protection.
You will find the option Virus and Threat Protection Settings. Select it. You will find several options, look for Exclusions. Select the option Add or remove exclusions. This will take you to the list of Files, Folders, Processes which are presently excluded by the windows anti-virus. It may be empty or may have some data.
Select "+ Add an Exclusion". You will find 4 options - File, Folder, File Type and Process. This is critical. Please choose Process.
In the "Enter Process Name" input box type in the name adb.exe. Please dont forget to type in the extension, just putting adb will not work. Accept the input with "Add" button.
You are done. Now goto the command prompt again and follow the same steps you did earlier to check the issue. Hopefully you will be pleasantly surprised and your entire Android Studio emulator experience should become seamless.
Note that the steps may slightly vary depending upon your version of Windows, Android Studio and SDK tools however it should still apply.

The new Android Studio incorporates very significant performance improvements for the AVDs (emulated devices).
But when you initially install the Android Studio (or, when you update to a new version, such as Android Studio 2.0, which was recently released), the most important performance feature (at least if running on a Windows PC) is turned off by default. This is the HAXM emulator accelerator.
Open the Android SDK from the studio by selecting its icon from the top of the display (near the right side of the icons there), then select the SDKTools tab, and then check the box for the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM installer), click OK. Follow instructions to install the accelerator.
Be sure to completely exit Android Studio after installing, and then go to your SDK folder (C:\users\username\AppData\Local\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager, if you accepted the defaults). In this directory Go to extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and run the file named "intelhaxm-android.exe".
Then, re-enter the Studio, before running the AVD again.
Also, I found that when I updated from Android Studio 1.5 to version 2.0, I had to create entirely new AVDs, because all of my old ones ran so slowly as to be unusable (e.g., they were still booting up after five minutes - I never got one to completely boot). As soon as I created new ones, they ran quite well.

Check this: Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator?
Android Emulator is very slow on most computers, on that post you can read some suggestions to improve performance of emulator, or use android_x86 virtual machine

As #Xavi mentioned, Android Emulator is normally slow and lags a lot. Either test your app on an actual device or use an alternative emulator such as BlueStack or Android-X86.
Another tip for using emulator is to not close if you ain't done testing your application. Just leave it open. In this case you skip the time it takes to launch.

Use x86 images and download "Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager" from the sdk manager.
See here how to enable it: http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html#accel-vm
Your emulator will be super fast!

The emulator is much much faster when running on Linux. In Ubuntu 13.04, it launches within 10 seconds, and it runs nearly as smoothly as on a physical device. I haven't been able to reproduce the performance on Windows.
EDIT:
Actually, after the first boot, when using the Atom arch. and GPU acceleration, the Windows emulator runs nearly as well as in Linux.

Try increasing your ram of intel HAXM by reinstalling it..
Worked for me..
In my pc HAXM setup's location was here:
C-Users-Pc's_name-AppData-Local-Android-sdk-extras-intel-Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager

Check this list:
install Intel HAXM
just use x86 AVD
use small size screen

I tend to load AVD through snapshot which can be setup in the AVD Manager > Choose AVD > Details... > Checking Emulator Options: Snapshot, and then to run the AVD, Select AVD in AVD Manager > Start... > Select Save To Snapshot and Launch from Snapshot. The first time, ensure that save to snapshot is chosen, as no snapshot exists to launch. The next time onwards choose launch from snapshot.
Slightly apprehensive to suggest this as well, but I have noticed a peculiar behavior when loading and running AVD. When I have the laptop battery being charged on my Lenovo laptop - 64 bit Windows 7, 4GB, 2.5GHz machine, the emulator loads and runs slightly faster and also lags less. I wonder if it is the configuration on my laptop to slow down high computational processes. Would be nice to know if someone else has noticed this behavior? Unplug the charger when the AVD is loaded and see if the AVD slows down.

A quick fix if using Android Studio (or Eclipse) is to disable the boot animation.
1) Select Run > Edit Configurations
2) Android Application > YOURAPP
3) Select the "Emulator" tab and check the "Disable boot animation"
This is will stop the "ANDROID" image from loading and boot directly to the lock screen, then keep your the emulator open. Also, to avoid problems, don't rotate the device before launch (Cmnd + Ctrl + F11), and don't try to run the app more than once during installation.

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.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to
Speed up your Android Emulator!:

Try using another android virtual device. You can create one by adding a new device by going to the AVD Manager. Select the screen size 3'2 and API-10 (gingerbread).
This worked for me, and it is super-fast now.
P.S.- My laptop used to take forever to load the emulator, and It never got started due to insufficient memory(4.2). I used to get restart again and again. This solved my problem.

Google Launches Android Studio 2.0 With Improved Android Emulator And New Instant Run Feature
New Features in Android Studio 2.0 :
1.Instant Run: Faster Build & Deploy
You can quickly see your changes running on your device or emulator.
Enable Instant Run follow this steps:
1.open Settings/Preferences
2.go to Build, Execution, Deployment
3.Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant
Please see this video of Instant Run --> Instant Run
2.GPU Profiler
For developers who build graphics-intensive apps and games, the Studio now also includes a new GPU profiler. This will allow developers to see exactly what’s happening every time the screen draws a new image to trace performance issues.
click here for more details about the GPU Profiler tool
Getting Started Guide for Android Emulator Preview
For more detail about android 2.0 Biggest and best update of 2015 you can see very good article Author by #nuuneoi :
First Look at Android Emulator 2.0, the biggest and the best update yet in years

In my case, the problem was coming from the execution of WinSAT.exe (located in System32 folder). I disabled it and issue solved.
To turn it off:
Start > Task Scheduler (taskschd.msc)
Find Task Scheduler (Local)
Task Scheduler Library
Microsoft > Windows > Maintenance
Right click WinSAT
Select disable.
The Reference
Also, suppress it from Task Manager or simply reboot your machine.
Point: In this situation (when the problem comes from WinSAT) emulator works (with poor performance) when you use Software - GLES 2.0 and works with very very poor performance when you use Hardware - GLES 2.0.

Aside from what everyone has already said about HAXM and other configuration settings as solutions for this problem, my solution had nothing to do with software configuration or processor limitations.
I setup Android studio on an older HDD and I had Visual Studio running an android emulator on an SSD. My bottleneck was the old HDD - the SSD I had resulted in more speed.
The solution - albeit not the best for you - is to look in installing an SSD. This is not a very feasible solution in 90% of the cases but for me the root cause was linked to my hardware - not my software config.
Hope this helps another person facing a similar problem!

This worked for me. My size on disk was just too high for the emulator to run correctly. Wiping the data took it from 4.9 GB to 2.9 GB.
Click on the AVD manager at the top right and it will pull up a screen with all your devices. In row with your device the very last icon will be a drop down arrow, click it. Click 'Wipe Data' then 'Cold Boot'

For those who enabled HAXM and the emulator still works slow here is what you should do:
If Avast antivirus is running on your computer, it is most likely the culprit.
as per HAXM Release_Notes.txt (Version 7.5.2):
On Windows, Avast Antivirus may interfere with HAXM and cause Android Emulator or QEMU to run very slowly. A workaround is to uncheck "Use nested virtualization where available" in Avast Settings > Troubleshooting.
So open your Avast dashboard > Menu > Settings > Troubleshooting and disable "Enable hardware-assisted virtualization"
Give a higher priority to your emulator's process in the Task Manager:
Locate your emulator's process in the Task Manager > Details tab:
Right-click on it and Set Priority -> Above normal
Sorry that the screenshot is not in English but you got the point, right?
That helped me significantly! I hope it will help you as well.
Also, one thing as per the Release Notes:
On Windows 8, 8.1 and 10, it is recommended to disable Hyper-V from Windows Features in order for the HAXM driver to properly function.
In my case, I didn't have any "Hyper-V" feature on my Windows 8.1 but you probably should try it, just in case. To locate and disable that feature see this article: https://support.bluestacks.com/hc/en-us/articles/115004254383-How-do-I-disable-Hyper-V-on-Windows-

This is probably because incomplete files in your sdk . Sometimes firewall of ur office or somewhere blocks it and hence error message comes saying peer not authenticated I was facing the same problem but after downloading all the files by getting firewall access
My emulator is working properly and much faster than before

how would you change Android AVD setting to make the emulator smooth as on the real android devices? [duplicate]

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I have got a 2.67  GHz Celeron processor, and 1.21  GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine.
My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me, it doesn't. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?
Even if it starts and loads the home screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3.5 (Galileo) and 3.4 (Ganymede).

Update
You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator. That will save emulator state, and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot.
Click on Emulator edit button, then click Show Advanced Setting. Then enable Quick Boot like below screenshot.
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 to the given below screenshots for more information.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:
Using ssd hard drive has too much impact and I recommend to use more suitable ram (8 or higher)

Try Android x86. It's much faster than the Google Android emulator. Follow these steps:
Install VirtualBox.
Download the ISO file that you need.
Create a virtual machine as Linux 2.6/Other Linux, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 GB. Network: PCnet-Fast III, attached to NAT. You can also use a bridged adapter, but you need a DHCP server in your environment.
Install Android x86 on the emulator, run it.
Press Alt+F1, type netcfg, remember the IP address, press Alt+F7.
Run cmd on your Windows XP system, change the directory to your Android tools directory, type adb connect <virtual_machine_IP>.
Start Eclipse, open the ADT plugin, find the device, and enjoy!

UPDATE: The latest version of Android studio (2.x) made major improvements to the bundled emulator. It's responsive and has a whole bunch of features.
For those still interested:
Try using Genymotion. You can download a version for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux after registering. A plugin for Eclipse is also available:
The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to "Help / Install New Software" menu, then just add a new Update Site with the following URL: http://plugins.genymotion.com/eclipse. Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse.
This emulator is fast and responsive.
GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level, signal strength, and GPS. The latest version now also contains camera tools.

The emulator included in your (old) version of Eclipse is very slow.
Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010. Update your SDK/IDE.
Personally, I use a real phone to do my tests. It is faster and tests are more realistic. But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don't want to buy several phones, you will have to use the emulator from time to time.

The startup of the emulator is very slow. The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once. If the emulator is already running and you run your app again, the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly. Of course, if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone, it is best to test it on a real phone.

You can create emulator.bat with following command to start the emulator. It will start faster.
emulator.exe -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>
Or on Unix (Mac or Linux flavors):
emulator -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim #<avd name>

I've noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there's no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) connected. So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager "SDK Setup.exe" and Eclipse is not started, the emulator works faster.
If you start the emulator from Eclipse: DDMS is there, so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow, but sometimes it's faster.

Emulators are slow. There's really nothing you can do about it, but there are alternatives to the emulator.
Genymotion - Preferred
VirtualBox
BlueStacks
YouWave
Windows Android Emulator
Jar of Beans
Andy
To make your emulator faster, you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version (Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)).
Developing on a Mac would be better. Why use an emulator, BTW? Using a real phone makes more sense.

As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools, the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency. The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at:
http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/devices/emulator.html#acceleration
For enabling GPU aceleration, run the emulator from the command line or add "-gpu on" to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration.
emulator -avd <avd_name> -gpu on
For using the CPU machine extensions, you have to install the driver (caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers). Once it's installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD.

Try to disable your antivirus. Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster.

Android SDK rev. 17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies.
This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot!
See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details: Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration
Don't forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system:
Configuring VM Acceleration on Windows
Configuring VM Acceleration on Mac
Configuring VM Acceleration on Linux
After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image (as described in the documentation) you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image:
For example:
Target: Intel Atom x86 System Image - API Level 10
CPU/ABI: Intel Atom (x86)

The option -cpu-delay <delay> described in Emulator Startup Options can help.

The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle. This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses. As a workaround, I pass -icount auto to QEMU when starting the emulator. You can make a batch file called my_avd.bat to do it for you:
emulator #my_avd -no-boot-anim -qemu -icount auto
#my_avd -- launch a virtual device named 'my_avd'
-no-boot-anim -- disable animation for faster boot
-qemu args... -- pass arguments to qemu
-icount [N|auto] -- enable virtual instruction counter with 2^N clock ticks per instruction
This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install tenfold.

Android emulator release 9 has a new "snapshot" feature. You can save the state of the emulator (make an image of the emulator) and avoid booting when you start the emulator.

You can review the emulator issues on the Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools talk, starting a 0:40:20.
The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well.
The main choking point is rendering since it's not running on any dedicated hardware but it's actually being performed through software rendering. Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance. Getting more/faster memory isn't going to help.
They've mentioned, at the time, that they're developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware, so eventually, you'll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware.

The current (May 2011) version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL -- this means that the GL code gets translated into software (ARM software, in fact) which then gets emulated in software in QEMU. This is crazy-slow. They're working on this problem and have it partially solved, but not with any sort of release quality.
Check out the video Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools to see it in action -- jump to about 44 minutes.

Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator
First, install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM). This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager. In the SDK Manager, it's located under Extras.
In the version of Android Studio I used (0.8.9), Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn't actually run the installer (I assume this will be fixed in later releases). To run the installer I had to go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-studio\sdk\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and manually launch intelhaxm.exe.
HAXM works with Intel devices, so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU.
Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86
This improved things considerably, but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish. The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD).
After these changes, Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag.
Be aware that these features are hardware dependent (CPU/GPU) and may not work on some systems.

Try Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.

To add further information to this.
I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) which in turn updated my Java version to:
Java version "1.6.0_20"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_20-b02)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 16.3-b01, mixed mode)
And now the emulator (although takes a while to start) seems to be running faster than previously.
It might be worth people upgrading their JVM.

A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android--it's fast, Hyper-V, x86, and free to download even without VS.

Here's what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all.
Assign all available processors to the emulator
Here's what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time. I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. I set it to use all available processors.
I'm using Windows 7.
When the Android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for "emulator-arm.exe" or "emulator-arm.exe *32"... Right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.

After developing for a while, my emulator became brutally slow. I chose wipe user data, and it was much much better. I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you've deployed.

Well, since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative 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 fluid and fast. Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device. The only downside 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. It is very impressive, considering I have rather an average computer hardware (dual core with 4 GB of RAM).

I had intermittent slow emulator (SDK v8.0) load times, up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10.04 VirtualBox 3.2.12 guest with Eclipse (3.6.1) loaded. I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 MB to 2048 MB and from that point on, I never experienced the slowness again (load times consistent at 33 seconds, CPU load consistent at 20%). Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs.

Android emulator is dead slow. It takes 800MB memory while running.
If you are on Windows, You can use Microsoft Android Emulator. It is superb, provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator. And most important it is fast ( consumes 13MB only).
It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview. I am using it and happy with it. I downloaded and installed entire VS pack, I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only.
Visual Studio Emulator for Android
EDIT:
Try https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/

I noticed that the my emulator (Eclipse plugin) was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings. Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive. It is still slow, but better than it used to be.

To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the "Disable Boot Animation" before starting the emulator. Refer to the Android documentation.
If in case you don't know, you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run/debug your app. If you click run/debug when it's already open, your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time.
Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%.

Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 version and then go to app open Settings/Preferences, the go to Build, Execution, Deployment → Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant Run. And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run.
And Instant run will look like this
However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now.

Develop Reference

The Android operating system is a mobile operating system that was developed by Google (GOOGL?) to be primarily used for touchscreen devices, cell phones, and tablets.