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Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator? [closed]
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I've got 4GB of RAM memory #800mhz, Phenom 9750 x4 #2.4GHz, yet the emulator is working really slow. I'm currently learning the basics of Android development, so I wonder, what should I do to maximize the performance of the emulator? Which device do I pick and what should be the settings? I do realize my PC is outdated and slow, but surely it can do better?
Make sure you aren't emulating another architecture in your settings. Choose Intel instead of any others and try again. I think you have to create a new device but I'm not certain.
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Just Curious. Did Apple do an awesome job with their iPhone simulator?
When Compared,The android Emulator running on i7 and iPhone simulator on i3. The iPhone simulator is faster than the real iPhone.
Did I fail to set things up right?
It's a matter of architectural decisions:
iOS simulator runs native code, directly on your CPU - the project has to be recompiled for x86 architecture to be used with simulator. The simulator itself simply emulates all the iOS APIs.
Android emulator, on the other hand, uses QEMU to run ARM (or x86, but ARM is more popular) CPU virtual machine, with all the software stack on top of it - Linux kernel, Android system image, etc. Think of it as an emulated hardware.
It's a sort of trade off - the way iOS does it is much faster, but it is harder to make it 100% compatible with the target system. For Apple it was perhaps a bit simpler, as iOS and Mac OS have many things in common.
For Android it makes a lot of sense to emulate the whole stack - it is easier to build cross-platform SDK, easier to test some system level components with it, etc. It's simply a different ecosystem, with different goals. Don't forget, that Android emulator can be used e.g. to test native ARM libraries compiled with Android NDK.
Today the Android emulator performance is more or less acceptable, but it was just a disaster in the early Android days. That said, personally I think that fast, API-level native simulator for Android would be a great addition to the SDK, making it possible to test less demanding projects much faster.
Interesting reading: http://logic-explained.blogspot.com/2011/09/why-is-there-no-x86-native-emulator-for.html
iphone ,iphone simulator,apple laptop ,xcode are apple products
but android
windows-Microsoft
android -Google
eclipse -eclipse vendor
these tools are different vendors that why android simulator slow.
i am just kidding :)
Apple Simulator is created using system configuration means it will take the System's ram, memory,cache automatically you don't have to configure it, so an Iphone Simulator is not act as real device but in case of Android one has to provide all the configuration details before creating the emulator,Android emulator to a great extent will act as real device but can be much slower than an Iphone Simulator.
Yes that's true, The emulator (FYI) is slower then simulator.
Does apple did an awesome job with the iPhone simulator?
No other developer can answer this because iOS is not open-source.
Did I fail to set things up right?
No, you are right at everything.
First of all Android does not have a Simulator it has an Emulator.
Secondly I believe the speed of the Emulator depends on your machine config. Better the config the better it will run provided you have created the AVD properly and given it ample memory.
That's simple:
Android Emulates real device, so real architeture and really close behaivour and layout.
In other hands apple simulator is not an emulator, so you can't expect real behaviour, but it has a close layout, which mainly solves for IOS, as you needs only 1 device to test the app behaviour.
Android SDK has an emulator, Whereas ios SDK has simulator.
A simulator behaves similar to something else, but is implemented in an entirely different way. It provides the basic behavior of a system but may not necessarily abide by all of the rules of the system being simulated. It is there to give you an idea about how something works. It uses Desktop resources like processor, ram etc.,
An emulator is a system that behaves exactly like something else, and abides by all of the rules of the system being emulated. It is effectively a complete replication of another system, right down to being binary compatible with the emulated system's inputs and outputs, but operating in a different environment to the environment of the original emulated system.
Thus simulator will be definitely fast compared to emulator.
The Android simulator is actually an emulator, designed to mimic a mobile device running Android, meaning it emulates the hardware running Android OS, to make it as close to 100% identical as possible. The JVM converts Java bytecode into ARM instructions that are decoded by the emulator.
The iOS simulator works at a higher level, simulating the operating system and its libraries, translating OS calls into OS X implementations and simulating events in the other direction like device rotation or low memory conditions. When you run an app on the iOS simulator, the app is compiled into x86 that runs natively on your Mac. Unlike the Android emulator, your iOS app won't run out of memory in the simulator because it's not constrained to any particular iOS device's memory limitations.
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Closed 10 years ago.
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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 anyone keeping track of the best hardware software development environment for Android/Eclipse development ?
I personally don't think there is any specific hardware that would make developing for android THAT much better. I would suggest a computer though that is running windows 7 and has a minimum of 6gbs of RAM
Windows 7 and 6GB+ of RAM for development.
Have an SSD on your desktop for holding the emulator images. Without an SSD emulator startup time is crazy...
I'm getting started with Android development, but the emulator performance on my machine leaves much to be desired. In all fairness, my machine is not a powerhouse by any stretch of the imagination.
Short of upgrading my hardware or spending $$$, are there any good tips for improving Android emulator performance?
Is testing on your own phone an option? That is a million times faster.
Also, are you "debugging" or "running" your app? If you don't need to step through code, consider running it rather than debugging it.
If you haven't added 2.2 to your toolbox, that will help. Once it's started, emulated 2.2 runs a bunch faster than emulated 2.1.
I still go back and test my applications on the older OSes, but for day-to-day development 2.2 has helped a lot.