My experience with the Android emulator is that it is so slow that it is unusable. I see threads related to the issue going back over a year. The lack of a coherent response to the question is unacceptable (this is not the Community's fault).
Question: Has anyone that has experienced extreme slowness (more than 15 minutes to launch) actually resolved this issue so that startup is less than a couple of minutes? If so, what did you do?
Please note that I am not trying to tie the emulator to Eclipse. I am teaching mobile web app development using jQTouch. The web apps are testing by running the emulator standalone and opening the Browser.
While my machine is a little dated, I have no trouble running Vista, Office, PowerStudio, etc. Here are details to add to the data around this issue.
OS: Microsoft Vista, 32-bit
Processor: Intel Celeron M CPU 520 # 1.60 GHz
Memory: 1.5 GB
Symantec Antivirus - Disabled
Emulator Start with no animation - did not help
Startup time in excess of 20 minutes
Java Version: 1.6.0_21
AVD Settings: Device RAM size 1024, Snapshot support enabled both in AVD and startup. - ram size and snapshot did not help
Google needs to acknowledge the issue and provide guidance about what development environments actually work. If there were a recommendation for platform, java version, memory, etc., I would follow it.
Right now I have no options other than to tell students that the Android emulator doesn't work. The only android solution is to buy a real phone, which limits testing to a single Android version and configuration.
Students are not having trouble with the iOS simulator running on the Mac.
If someone that works for Google could actually comment, that would be great.
Thanks,
Dale
The Android emulator is just that, an emulator -- it is emulating an ARM processor. Emulation will never be as fast as native. Given you are using such a large amount of your computer's memory for the emulator, you are likely having to page consistently, which will add to making the performace suffer.
The iOS simulator on the other hand is just a set of APIs that matches the iOS SDK and pretends to be an iOS device, but is running all code natively on the machine with all the resources, processor speed and memory the machine has, and likely to run significantly faster than running on the actual device.
I have no problem running the Android emulator on my old Core Duo T2400 # 1.83GHz with 2GB of RAM. The startup time can be a few minutes, but once it is running it works well with only occasional lag.
My desktop with a Core 2 Quad Q6700 # 2.66GHz with 2GB RAM tears through the emulator.
Both machines have run the emulator under Windows and Linux with varying Java versions getting similar results. My guess is that your processor is a little on the weak side.
check this article How to speed up the android emulator by up to 400
Or in brief, download an android-x86 build here, install with virtualbox, find ip address of android vm by alt+F1 and netcfg (alt+F7 to go back to graphical mode), and connect to the vm using adb (say adb connect 192.168.1.5).
Just used it, much more faster.
I've found the emulator to be very slow too - I think it's best to have a working android device and just have the emulator for a backup 'second opinion' or a reference device. It's usable but much slower than my phone, even though my current device is quite low end.
Eventually, I found that sending my code to the physical device (or emulator) was becoming a bottleneck so I build a small framework to allow me to develop most of the work as a desktop application. This has worked very well so far and has sped up my development turn around considerably. Your milage may vary.
Try using Genymotion emulator for android which is fast and also support all major platforms including Linux/Mac and windows. It also has specific emulator image files to emulate actual mobile devices like Xeperia Z or Nexus 4 and so forth.
Use Genymotion. It s is a very fast android emulator.
Android emulator is just a emulator, it emulates an Android device. It's like virtualization, you share your computer's resources with emulator, you'll need to have the latest processor and at least 8GB or RAM to run faster. About RAM: Windows and background programs consumes a part of your resources, if you upgrade your computer resources, the consumption of these software will be almost insignificant and you'll have a lot of resources for your emulator (supposing you also have Eclipse or Android Studio running).
Related
I recently built an android application that i need to run 24/24 7/7.
I thought about using web servers, so I bought KVM VPS WITH 2GB RAM AND 2 CPU CORES (Ubuntu). I tried to install Genymotion on it but it doesn't work, so I tried to use the androidx86 version on virtualbox and it works but it is very slow.
Now i am asking if there is a way to run an android application 24/24 on a server ?
In order to run an Android application on your computer and have it be fast, you'll need to use the x86_64 or x86 images. Using an ARM or MIPS based image requires overhead since native instructions can't be run on an x86 computer. Genymotion is good, but I find the new Android Emulator is really fast, and it's free.
I would check out the new Android Emulator and use an x86/x86_64 based image. You can customize your image to provide extra disk space and RAM allocation to the system image for better performance. I've had great luck getting it to run quickly and smoothly in recent builds.
Here is blog post and video from Google announcing the new and improved emulator at Android Dev Summit in December of 2015: http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2015/12/android-studio-20-preview-android.html
Note: Please make sure you have the most up to date Android SDK for best performance and to make sure you have the version they talk about in the link.
I had install android studio 1.0 in two days ago, but when I want run a emulator, I should wait for run more than 10 minutes.(my system is Asus N53sv and my emulator is google_Nexus_API 17 x86).
Now what do am I?
Emulators are slow.
They're bootstrapping the entire mobile device and its components, and you'd require a machine with decent hardware to run one quickly.
Emulators are memory intensive. Android Studio happens to be as well, and if this is your machine, then it's not going to load very fast at all. I'm surprised that it's loading at all!
There's not much you could do outside of upgrading your machine, though.
My Android emulator runs painfully slow on my PC so I was thinking about installing Ubuntu on a virtual machine and running the AVD there. Do you think it would be faster if I did so?
you have two solution.
one, you install AndroVM on VirtualBox.
AndroVM
this way is very faster, but bit difficult to setup and controll.
other way is create AVD which is made in Intel x86.
Configuring the x86 Emulator
this way is very fast too.and setup and controll is very easy compare to general emulator.
but this way require CPU which support Intel VT / AMD-V
both way is good,please choose you like :)
I would put my money on Linux - as it has less of a footprint OS wise.
On the other hand, Windows is by far more used, so if they've developed it and put time into the one that is used the most, it could be Windows.
As a side note: there are several new android emulators that run on windows, some I've seen actually interface with the hardware (this avoids a layer of abstraction).
If your concerned with speed, you will get better performance with less programs running as the emulator is process intensive. (My i7, 8gb ram, is usable for developing - though nothing beats a device... Or nexus for that matter)
To connect to your computer: Debugging on my phone (Eclipse, Android)
I do not know what to do. I purchased a new laptop, hp pavillion i5 6GB RAM, started Android 3.2 emulator and it is still as slow as unusable!!!
It's not that it is slow, it's that I cannot do anything.
I set 1GB of RAM, disabled camera on emulator and run it. When I click on Applications, they first load for 30s and then I am not able to start any app, not mine, not default ones. All I can do is return to desktop and open Applications menu.
I see people complain that the emulator is slow and I am not even able to make it run. What is worse, my laptop eats games like a sandwich, but it chokes with Android emulator 3.2. The same is with Android 3.0 emulator!
Can anyone help me set up the emulator so that I can run it on my machine?
PS. if you want, I will record a video and post it to visually see what I am talking about.
I do not know what to do. I purchased a new laptop, hp pavillion i5 6GB RAM, started Android 3.2 emulator and it is still as slow as unusable!!!
The Android emulator uses a single core. If you had gone with a Core i7 with Turbo Boost, that would have helped. Your Core i5 is not an especially powerful CPU on a per-core basis.
The Android 3.x emulators also do all graphics purely in software (no hardware graphics acceleration) and convert ARM instructions to x86 on the fly.
Can anyone help me set up the emulator so that I can run it on my machine?
Start by using the Android 4.0 emulator, with the latest Android development tools. This uses your desktop's GPU for graphics rendering, and it helps performance a bit.
If that proves insufficient, you can start switching to x86 emulator images if you are not doing NDK development (where you will tend to want to test on ARM). At the moment, the only official x86 image is for 2.3.3, but there is an unofficial one for 4.0.3 built from the AOSP that runs exceptionally fast (at least on Linux, haven't tried it on Windows).
My only suggestion to you would be to change the "ADB Connection Timeout (ms)" in Eclipse under Window->Preferences->Android->DDMS. I am using a HP Pavillion 486 laptop, and was really struggling with the emulators. I changed the default timeout value from 5000 ms (5 sec) to 60000 ms (1 minute). This didn't solve all of my problems, but it did help in the startup of both the emulator and my applications.
With the latest SDK release, and the ability to download separate platforms releases into the SDK, the hardware resources required to develop for Android have increased significantly. Assuming that the developer targets all currently available seven platforms - that could take your dev machine to its knees. Taken alone the 'Android SDK Content Loader' takes nearly two minutes on a dual-core machine with 2GB memory.
As the title suggest the reason for creating this wiki is for everyone to list their development hardware configurations, and thus determine what is a well-suited machine for Android development.
The secondary reason for the wiki is that I'm trying to get my employer to provide me with a decent machine for development as I'm currently forced to work on a nearly 4 year old randomly-built machine, and expected to deliver great results. However, the reality is that my system keeps running out of memory, and I can hardly get a chance to write a few lines of code in between the numerous crashes.
Hope this grows well enough so it helps out beginners to decide whether or not an upgrade on their existing configurations will improve their productivity! Of course, I hope it will serve me as a good evidence to show to my employer that I do need an upgrade too!
Thanks!
Black MacBook (Jan. 2008) 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB HD, with the built-in Intel graphics chipset. I've got a 23" Samsung LCD that I hook it up to when I'm working at my desk.
Only thing upgraded is the RAM. Eclipse had a tendency to freeze up all the time until I upgraded the RAM.
So, my setup goes like this:
MacBook Mac OS 10.6, 2.4 Ghz, 4 GB RAM, NVidia 9400
I was working working on this machine before
iMac, 2.2 GHz, 4GB RAM, I forget which ATI card
I have a MacBookPro 4GB RAM, 2.53 Ghz, 320GB 7,200 RPM hard drive.
Works like a charm, though Eclipse does take a lot of RAM (about 400-600MB), so I try not to use a lot of other CPU/RAM intensive apps at the time (music/media, VM, etc).
I am using the following.
Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit,
AMD Phenom 9950 Agena 2.6GHz Quad Core,
AMD Radeon HD 4850 512 MB
4 GB Ram,
10,000 RPM HDD
Dual 21' LCD monitors
The system is about 1.5 years old, but is still working great.
I'm using Ubuntu Linux OS, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.40GHz CPU, 2GB memory, 15KRPM hard drive, 37" 1080P LCD TV monitor.
No complaints re Android development with Eclipse. System does become barely functional due to excessive swapping if I try to use a VirtualBox VM with Windows XP loaded (to test web pages in MSIE, etc.) and lots of memory allocated while things like Eclipse are also gobbling memory, though. Eclipse's default memory use settings have been cranked up as well, however.
I'm using Windows XP sp3,Intel pentium D 3.0ghz processor,2GB RAM,80GB HDD,No external graphics card installed. I'm able to develop for android versions up to 2.2 without having much delay.but when it comes to androi 2.3 and above my emulator takes a lot of time to load and run apps.