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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

Federico klez Culloca
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Dale
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    1.6 GHz processor with 1.5GB memory and you are using 1GB for android? try with 192 or something like that – fazo Mar 05 '11 at 15:30
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    What kind of Android device comes with a gigabyte of RAM anyways...? – Matti Virkkunen Mar 05 '11 at 15:34
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    I feel your pain. Invest in some hardware, that's the only way. – Seva Alekseyev Mar 05 '11 at 15:36
  • I've tried it in a little better computer than yours and I found it very slowly in degub mode (in run mode it was much better). The best way would be to adquire a real android device because you won't be able to test all features with the emulator, though the emulator helps a lot. – Javi Mar 05 '11 at 15:42
  • Good point on RAM size compared to physical RAM on the system. I got the advise to increase the RAM size from stackoverflow, but I should have considered my actual hardware first. The AVD did not launch with 192. I'll try some additional sizes to see what might work. – Dale Mar 05 '11 at 17:32
  • I have to agree, I am rocking an i5, 4GB RAM and I am still lagging a lot in performance in regards to the emulator –  Aug 12 '11 at 17:06
  • Hell, I have RAID0 on 2 vertex3 ssds, 16gb ram & i7 2600 stock and it still is annoyingly slow. Not unusable, though. – Ege Özcan Mar 21 '12 at 15:55
  • @MattiVirkkunen Samsung Galaxy SIII 1.4 ghz quad core lol – siaooo Nov 01 '12 at 18:31
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    possible duplicate of [Slow Android emulator](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1554099/slow-android-emulator) – Kristopher Johnson Nov 27 '13 at 13:01
  • Try this one: http://stackoverflow.com/a/24277913/1004605 – Favas Kv Jun 18 '14 at 05:54

7 Answers7

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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.

Dre
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  • I do have a follow-up question. Is the emulator written in java? (You know where this is heading: a virtual machine running on a virtual machine, no wonder there are issues.) – Dale Mar 05 '11 at 18:51
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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.

onemach
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  • Great suggestion. iOS's simulator is x86. I have to wonder why Google didn't provide an x86 emulator in the first place. There is just no need to actually emulate ARM. Whatever unlikely bugs you might not catch from having a different architecture is far outweighed by having an emulator that doesn't run at 1fps. – tumtumtum Jan 08 '13 at 21:39
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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.

beat2049
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    Exactly. 1.6ghz Celeron? You'd be better off using your phone as your main PC... –  Mar 05 '11 at 23:02
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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.

Sadegh
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Use Genymotion. It s is a very fast android emulator.

Neeraj
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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).

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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.

Luther
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