Android emulator is very very slow

Question

My laptop: Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GHz, 1GB RAM.

I created a target with SD Card 512MB, Device RAM size 512, snapshot enabled. I waited for 30 minutes but the emulator doesn't ends up loading. It keeps showing a flash word "Android" on the black screen.

Before running the emulator, I closed most other programs.

What's wrong with it? This is very frustrating. :(

possible duplicates http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1554099/slow-android-emulator — Aravindhan, Jun 08 '11 at 12:53
I always recommend foregoing the Emulator and rapidly testing on a real device if you can. Use the emulator for conformance testing to API's you do not have with you. — Robert Massaioli, Jun 08 '11 at 13:22
Android Emulator runs faster for me on Linux (Ubuntu 11.10) than on Windows 7. Far from perfect though, but much better. — Evgenii, Feb 04 '12 at 03:14
I suggest you to try this: http://stackoverflow.com/a/17394283/1204249 — amp, Jun 30 '13 at 21:33
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1554099/slow-android-emulator — Yog Guru, Sep 03 '13 at 07:46

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 08 '11 at 12:54

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What is your CPU and RAM usage during startup? Do you have a lot of IO swapping occurring? Considering that Windows needs at least 512 to run right half of the time and Eclipse is a memory hog you probably just need more RAM.

answered Jun 08 '11 at 12:54

Andrew White

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CPU Usage now is 100%, PF Usage 1.73GB, I open Eclipse, Emulator and Firefox. 45 minutes passed. – emeraldhieu Jun 08 '11 at 12:59
Yeah, you're 73% over committed and the OS is trying to swap out all of the memory pages with pages on disk which is *extremely* slow. – Andrew White Jun 08 '11 at 13:02
Well, I have 16GB of RAM on my PC and giving >= 1GB to emulator crashes it. The best solution here is to use MIPS images I suppose. On my machine, loading of Android 4.2 MIPS image takes no longer than 2min. On the machine with 4GB of RAM it takes about 2-3min as well. – lomza Jan 17 '13 at 11:41

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 08 '11 at 12:53

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You're assigning the emulated Android instance half of the physical memory on your machine. Get more memory.

answered Jun 08 '11 at 12:53

Graham Borland

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And that's just for the SD card! – dmon Jun 08 '11 at 13:23
@dmon: Both the SD card and the device RAM are insane values. I usually use 32MB for the SD card, as it takes a while for the SD card image to be generated. However, that does not affect system RAM, as the SD card is just a file. The device RAM value has a far greater impact on the physical memory on the machine. – CommonsWare Jun 08 '11 at 13:41
@CommonsWare: yep, I always start my emulators with 10 MB SDs. And you're right, for some reason I got confused and thought it mapped the SD straight to memory. – dmon Jun 08 '11 at 13:57

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 08 '11 at 13:11

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Emulator is in general very slow, and the higher the OS version on the emulator, the slower it gets. I'm a game developer, and with my AMD Athlon X3 2.90 GHz with 4GB RAM it gives me 5-6 fps. I tried to open one of my apps on Honeycomb emulator, and it was really terrible. It opened, but I couldn't do anything with it. So the best answer is purchasing a real device.

answered Jun 08 '11 at 13:11

Egor

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I improved my RAM 2GB more (3GB now) and allocated 1024MB for "Device RAM size". It now ends up loading but it's still very slow, I think it is no longer the issue of RAM, is it related to graphics card? – emeraldhieu Jun 11 '11 at 16:35
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I don't know how fast should be a PC to make emulator work at least fine, with no lags and slowdowns. Improving the computer will maybe give a bit more speed, but I'd prefer spending money on purchasing devices, at least a phone and a tablet. – Egor Jun 11 '11 at 17:40

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 08 '11 at 16:16

It shouldn't take more than 5-10min at most to build the emulator on initial startup. The SD card size has no effect on memory usage, it's not loaded into memory, it just creates a larger image file for the sdcard. Setting the emulator to have 256mb of ram will help, but in general when I have the same problem I just close down the emulator window and re-start it. Sometimes it just gets hung-up on creation and isn't a memory issue (I have 16gb of ram and still have the problem from time to time)

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 08 '11 at 13:04

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I've experienced the same thing and in my case I had to set "Min SDK Version" when creating the project in Eclipse. Without this setting the emulator didn't start.

answered Jun 08 '11 at 13:04

Daniel

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I just start the emulator, nothing to do with "Min SDK Version" or "project". – emeraldhieu Jun 08 '11 at 13:07
Right, but when you created the project did you specify "Min SDK Version"? – Daniel Jun 08 '11 at 13:09

score 0 · Answer 6 · answered Feb 05 '15 at 12:41

Android Development Tools (ADT) 9.0.0 (or later) has a feature that allows you to save state of the AVD (emulator), and you can start your emulator instantly. You have to enable this feature while creating a new AVD or you can just create it later by editing the AVD.

Also I have increased the Device RAM Size to 1024 which results in a very fast emulator.

Refer the given below screenshots for more information.

enter image description here

And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:

score -1 · Answer 7 · answered Jun 18 '12 at 07:40

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The native Android emulator is really slow. It's much faster if you use Android on a virtual machine. You can follow my detailed guide on setting it up. http://www.bobbychanblog.com/2011/07/faster-android-emulator-alternative-using-virtualbox/

answered Jun 18 '12 at 07:40

Bobby

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Android emulator is very very slow

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