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I thought the Gingerbread emulator was slow, but man - the Honeycomb emulator is so slow on a modern PC, it's practically unusable. Since Reto Meier asked to throw up our Honeycomb questions onto StackOverflow, here is mine - will it get faster any time soon? How are we expected to develop apps for tablets when I want to pull my hair out instead?

The SDK tools site now mentions "Known issues with emulator performance: Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer, emulator performance is slow. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues and it will improve in future releases" but I'm wondering just how soon these future releases with the fixes will be coming out.

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Artem Russakovskii
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    I'm going to cast a close vote as this question is just argumentative. No one will be able to really answer it. I'm sure Reto meant to say that you should ask technical questions about Honeycomb. Maybe you can rephrase it so it becomes a technical question. – Octavian Helm Jan 27 '11 at 10:14
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    I'm trying to collect some current tips & explanations relating to performance on the preview at http://goo.gl/MncBA . Hopefully some will help you or at least explain why you might be seeing the level of performance you are. – Al Sutton Jan 27 '11 at 10:19
  • @Octavian Actually, my hope was that Reto himself would be able to answer it, or anyone else from the Android team. Which he did. – Artem Russakovskii Jan 27 '11 at 17:01
  • It is perfectly fine to ask. Please don't get me wrong on that. What I meant is that you should rephrase the question to a technical question like `Is there some way to improve the Honeycomb emulator?`. – Octavian Helm Jan 27 '11 at 17:21

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The short answer is "yes". The Honeycomb emulator performance will be improved in future release of the development tools.

For right now, you should start by increasing the amount of device RAM used by the emulator. The default is 256Mb but 1Gb is probably more reasonable.

[Update (April 9 2012) -- The latest developer tools release (r18), combined with a new system image (4.0.3 r2) dramatically improves performance of the emulator by supporting GPU and CPU acceleration. More details here.]

Reto Meier
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    Upping the RAM to 1GB makes it a lot more responsive for me – Jason Knight Jan 28 '11 at 02:20
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    Better, but still not a very good experience. – Brian Wigginton Mar 21 '11 at 05:14
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    Did you change the heap size? – technoSpino Apr 07 '11 at 17:37
  • hey i use 2 GB ram in my laptop and 4 GB in my desktop but its still slow, any idea to make that working fast? – Ads May 04 '11 at 11:40
  • What exactly meaning of increasing ram of device ? My laptop use 4Gb but still honeycomb emulator is very slow. Please gimme some solution to increase performance. – Srinivas May 14 '11 at 12:12
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    @Srinivas: in AVD Manager, select your AVD, click "Edit...". In the dialog that opens, change parameter "Device ram size" from 256 to, say, 1024 – Pēteris Caune May 17 '11 at 19:17
  • @Reto: I've noticed on my quad core i5 that when starting the emulator it makes my first core stay at 100% usage, and doesn't seem to even use the others. Will this be corrected, or is it an architecture problem? – Austyn Mahoney Jun 30 '11 at 23:59
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    @Austyn - QEMU (emulator) is single threaded, so throwing more CPUs at the emulator won't help – Axarydax Aug 10 '11 at 08:15
  • When I incresed my ram size to 1GB (1024) and tried starting the emulator, I got a message saying "Cannot allocate memory". Running on an i5 laptop with 8GB RAM (Process Explorer is showing the current use level at 3.8GB). Reducing the ram to 700 level got me started, but still wondering why I should get this message? – Samik R Apr 04 '12 at 21:48