Is there any way to get the emulator work normally ?
Its still very slow and useless, I tried adjusting the cache size and Ram.
My system configuration is quite good, are there any tips and hints to speed up the avd ?
Not much you can do, but Al Sutton lays out some things that can help a bit.
http://blog.alsutton.com/2011/01/27/the-android-honeycomb-preview-emulator/
For serious development, you'll need a Honeycomb tablet.
You may have heard the many complaints about how slow the Honeycomb emulator is. And indeed, the Android emulators have long been slow. Certainly slower than most phones. But Honeycomb is slower, so much so, that even Google engineers have admitted it makes more sense to develop testing on a real tablet.
Now my experience has been a little surprising: on my 1.6(?)GHz Pentium with 4G of memory running Win7, I have been surprised at how fast it runs. That is, I was prepared for the worse, yet found the response time to taps surprisingly reasonable.
That said, it is still noticeably slower than the 2.2 emulator. But not as slow as the real hardware we had to suffer with in the 80s;)
Finally, not only the emulator, but the whole SDK (including that memory hog Eclipse) become a LOT more usable when you have at least 3.5G of memory available. This means a 4G stick. When I was trying to run the 1.6 SDK under Linux with only 2G, it was frustrating how often Eclipse locked up. But with 4G, it is fine. So upgrade your memory to at least 4G before you worry about other measures, such as faster CPU.
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Despite this, my android emulator is a lot laggy. Animations are a lot jerky and it's not smooth at all. What should I do to speed up android emulator? I've read this: Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator? and tried things listed but it isn't working.
What should I do?
Apparently, in your environment, the x86 images perform better than the x86_64 ones. Whether that is tied to your CPU (i5 vs. i7) or something else, I can't say.
Moral of this story: try a variety of emulator images to see what the problem is. CPU architecture, screen resolution, GPU emulation mode, and such all affect performance.
I've been programming for about two years (android and java for a few months), but I still don't really know what impact the processor (speed and cores) and the amount of RAM has on the "programming experience" (compilation time, responsiveness of tools, overall workflow, etc.).
(If I'm allowed) to be specific (otherwise ignore): I'm about to buy a 13" MacBook Pro and try to decide between the i5 (2,5 GHz Dual-Core) and the i7 (2,9 GHz Dual-Core) and find this hard.
I don't program in Android that often, or even use Eclipse regularly, but I know that in my old 1GB laptop, Eclipse takes forever to load and is very sluggish, while it loads pretty much almost instantly with my new 8GB, is almost flawlessly smooth. But the only difference in the two laptops are not just the RAM or the CPU though, the old laptop is spinning a 5400rpm disk platter while my new one uses solid chips.
Specifically with Android development though, you will be running the emulator and probably multiple instances of the emulator at the same time. These emulators are pretty memory hungry, and Eclipse aren't lightweight by any measures either. You never ever want swapping, swapping is only there for so the system doesn't start killing processes if it ever runs out of memory, but you don't want it to ever be filled with anything with day-to-day usage. If your system starts swapping, that's the sign that it's severely need more RAM.
In my personal experience, larger and faster RAMs generally contribute to responsiveness better than faster CPUs (though you still need to get at least a mid-range CPU); compilation is usually I/O bound (although this might be different depending on the codebase) so it's best if the OS can keep all the files you're currently working with in disk cache in the RAM, and for loading times you want a fast harddrive (or even better, an SSD; because fast harddrive is much noisier, much more vibrations, and battery hogs, which is sometimes acceptable for a desktop tower below your desk but not for laptop).
Another important consideration is power-saving features in the CPU and battery life if you're going to be using it on the way; the weight, the screen and keyboard size, the "feel" of the touchpad (is it too slippery, or too rough, etc; once you get used to it, touchpad is much faster and comfortable than the mouse since it's much closer to the keyboard). Don't just compare the numbers.
I have three development computers. One Dell Latitude with i7, 8GB ram and a SSD with Windows 7. The other is a 17' i7, 8GB ram, SSD Macbook Pro with OS X.
The last one is a old HP small form factor, Core2Duo, 2GB ram and a slow HDD.
All three are fine for Eclipse, and NONE will run the emulator as fast as I want to. The emulator is sluggish, even on a $3000 laptop - the difference between i5 and i7 won't be that huge.
If I were you, I would opt for the cheaper one of them, and invest in a decent Android phone for running the software.
I am almost done with my app..when i run it on the emulator ,at certain points,
it is very slow and what i see is undesirable..when I run the same on my phone (xperia X8)
it works fine.
I really tried understanding why this is happening but of no avail!
What should I do now? run some more tests and try optimizing or just
release it in the market?
Is what I am seeing expected? Any info will be appreciated
You really should buy as many Android phones as you can. You definitely should have one with a physical keyboard, one slate phone, and one for the lowest API you are supporting. Personally, I have G1, Droid, and Nexus S that I test my apps on. Its so much faster than the emulator and easier to use. Its also a better metric of how your app works due to it being on actual hardware.
The emulator will always be slower than a real device (most likely, slower than any real device), so don't worry too much about it.
However, due to it's slowness, it can highlight areas where you may want to spend some time optimising your code that you may not necessarily find on your hardware. This is especially true on portable devices with limited CPU power, resources, and electrical power available.
It may be worth trying to find out what is causing the slowdowns in the emulator - if it's regular enough and accompanied by (for example) high CPU usage, then while a physical device may handle it better, you may find that you are unnecessarily consuming battery power and your users may not thank you for that.
The emulator is generally much slower than a physical device, so it's not a problem with your application. As long as it runs well on your phone it should be fine.
I agree with everything dbaugh said. At least at the time of this writing, the emulator is of limited use. Google has acknowledged the limitations of the current emulator and indicated they are working to revamp it. But until that happens. Stick to hardware testing.
Is there a way to make the emulator work correctly ? it is extremly slow and there is really no way to debug application this way.
Anyone experiencing this ?
Note : This is for the android 3.x platform of the SDK.
Thanks.
Everyone is experiencing this issue, even who have Intel i7 with 16 gb of ram...
The problem is that the biggest resolution (mostly 1280x800) have killed the emulator performance...
At the last google I/O some kind of hardware acceleration was shown, but it's in early stage of development I think.. But the performance were way better.
Today the only solution to develop on Honeycomb is to buy a real tablet..
The Android Emulator is slow with every OS version (but Google is working on it). Also, if you're running the Emulator on an already slow system, this slows it down, too.
If you're getting any errors, feel free to post the outputted error-messages. Otherwise I'm afraid you'll have to wait until the performance-issues are solved.
I try to run the hello android example on my notebook Dell Latitude D531 which has following specification:
http://img573.imageshack.us/img573/9990/ntbspecification.png
I set the virtual device as following:
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/4070/myavd.png
(Sorry for links instead of images, but I don't have enough reputation points yet)
When I created this AVD and started it, it took like two hours to start, after that, the device was unusably slow. I read the other topics here, where people wrote about their experience with starting of the emulator, that it took long ... like 15 minutes when they started it for the first time. But in my case it takes not minutes but hours, and when start is completed, it isn't usable at all.
What are your suggestions for improvement of speed or performance in this case?
What do I do wrong? - is my notebook too slow, is the configuration bad, whatever you think could help me ...
With regards,
Tom
You have three problems:
Your notebook CPU is a bit weak
The 3.0 emulator is unusable, IMHO, unless you increase the "Device ram size" to 1024 in the AVD configuration (your 2nd screenshot), which may be more than your PC can afford to give the emulator, particularly if you are also running Eclipse, since you only have 3GB of RAM
The 3.0 emulator is slow in general, even on faster hardware
Right now, I recommend that you use an earlier API level (e.g., API Level 8) for your emulator, if possible.
I've found that using the snapshot feature helps, sometimes. The emulator is pretty unreliable. If you're doing any amount of dev I would get a real device. Even an outdated "cheap & cheerful" one from ebay would give you a big productivity boost.