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.
Related
Core i3 370m 1st Gen 2cores 4threads #2.5ghz.
6GB DDR3 RAM
OS: Manjaro Linux
Can this laptop run Android studio without the emulator(I will use an Android device for that).
Is upgrading the cpu to a core i7 640m 1st gen 2cores and 4threads at 2.6 ghz recommended?
Your CPU will run it fine, not impressive though, but your ram might be a limiting factor and if you are going to be making a proper project with lots of xml and java class files that 6gb ram might be a limiting factor bottlenecking the whole system. Even though Linux is a light version OS Android Studio can still horde on ram.
Edit Based on Comment (Cant share image there)
yes 8 gb will get you buy but the problem is you will eventually have problems even with 8gigs later own (as you scale projects and make more complex apps) and you wont be able to upgrade your ram as maximum support of both the 370m and 640m is limited to 8gb
If I were you ill just stick with 6gigs and get myself familiar with android studio and save some money and upgrade to at least a 2th gen or higher to get that 16 gigs max capacity
Edit 3 (posting intel ark link)
here is the Intel ark page link search for any cpu that you find in your budget range which has at least 16 gb max capacity limit (for ram)
For running android studio You have the correct processor but it is recommended to upgrade the RAM to 8 GB as it is recommended by Google, But if you cannot than you might face OS hanging issue
I want build a ROM version by myself. But I'm not sure if laptop with 4GB RAM memory is enough for development. Anybody help me?
P/s: Laptop is running Ubuntu 14.04 64bit
I would suggest you to read the minimum requirements mentioned by Google.
Link: AOSP Minimum Requirements
As an additional note, if you are keeping swap space, make sure it is half the size of your RAM.
16GB is recommended if you are building in a virtual machine on top of windows. I increased the swap partition on 6GB physical building initially.
I've now built omnirom marshmallow for nexus 10 with Ubuntu 14 natively installed, 16GB of ram. During the build it didn't go much above 6GB RAM use.
You'll find CPU gets max'd out first, at least on my dual core i5 (2.5-3Ghz)
I have read about building Android on ubuntu server, that may have slightly lower RAM requirements.
I have an old laptop running Windows Vista with a 2.6 Ghz Intel Celeron and 2 gigs of RAM. I was considering installing Lubuntu or another lightweight Linux distro on it to use for travel. Would this be able to run the Android SDK/Eclipse reasonably well? All other threads I could find were about running the emulator-I will be running the apps on my Galaxy S4 or Nexus 7, so I just need Eclipse to run.
Thanks in advance.
It should be able to run it, but probably not very fast. The Celeron line of processors had a small internal cache and were only single core. Eclipse is a big piece of software which uses a lot of RAM and can be disk intensive as well. I've got an older Core2 Duo 2GHz with 4GB of RAM and Eclipse/ADT can be pretty sluggish at times if I have to use that machine. Good luck!
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.
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).