High CPU usage with Android emulator (qemu-system-i386.exe)

Question

The emulator qemu-system-i386.exe cpu usage almost constantly running between 7~9

Android studio 2.1 Android SDK Tools: 25.1.3 Host Operating System: Windows 7 - i7

Answer 1

I am on macOS Catalina(Version 10.15.2) with Intel Core i9 and 16 GB RAM and Radeon Pro 560X 4GB Graphics.

I solved high CPU usage by qemu by restarting the emulated device using the emulated power button.

Also, while creating the AVD, I chose Hardware Graphics Renderer instead of Auto.

Answer 2

In my case, I only encountered this issue when running multiple instances of the emulator.

Re-run the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM) installer provided in the Android SDK (<Android SDK path>\extras\intel\Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager\intelhaxm-android.exe), select Change, and see how much memory is allocated to HAXM. If it's 2 GB or less, you probably want to raise it to at least 4 GB. Then restart your emulator and see if the CPU usage drops.

Answer 3

I wasn't able to shut the audio off with the config.ini file, but only with the -noaudio cmd line argument to qemu. However, with Android Studio 3.2, you can't add custom arguments to the emulator, so I made this:

In the emulator dir of the Android SDK, in my case ~/Android/Sdk/emulator/

mv emulator emulator.orig

Make a bash script called emulator with the content:

#!/bin/bash

DIR=`dirname "$0"`

$DIR/emulator.orig -noaudio $*

Then:

chmod +x emulator

Now, the argument -noaudio will be added to all invocations of emulator from Android Studio and will save you a lot of CPU cycles.

Answer 4

I solved it by cancelling "Auto-save current state to Quickboot"

Snapshots -> Settings -> Auto-save current state to Quickboot - NO

Answer 5

I had the same issue recently on Windows 10 (18363): the AVD used all of the host's 16 Threads at 100%, it seems the android.hardware.graphics.composer@2.1-service process on the AVD was to blame.

What helped in my case: going to AVD settings - Advanced - change the OpenGL ES renderer to Desktop native OpenGL and restart the AVD. Now it uses like 2-3% of my CPU resources. Hope this helps someone.

Answer 6

Using the x86_64 (Or the 64 bit) emulator solved it for me. They recommend the x86 version, but it was acting up for me.