Android emulator uses 100% cpu even if nothing i running on it ?

Question

I have a celeron processor :/ and android emulator on eclipse uses 100% of cpu and hangs everything unless I kill it . I was just trying a hello android program from a book

Answer 1

I strongly recommend not to use android emulator. Use VirtualBox + android x86 OS (you can download it here ), and you will get real perfomance increase.

Unfortunately, as far as i remember, it is not from google and it supports only Android 2.2. I really do not understand, why google is not going to make simulator as fast as iPhone simulator , or to make official x86 release for debugging. I do not need emulating ARM processor instructions and I think 99% developers do no need it too.

Answer 2

The emulator is notoriously slow to start; it can take 15 minutes or longer on an underpowered machine. You can speed start-up a bit by passing the -no-boot-anim to the emulator start-up command. Other emulator options are described here. Also, some AVDs start faster than others. Try creating an AVD with the lowest level SDK that is useful for you.

Once the emulator has started, you don't need to shut it down. When an app exits (or crashes, or whatever), you can just run it again.

Answer 3

Niels' answer worked well for me https://stackoverflow.com/a/7706018 in that the emulator stopped using 100% CPU (dropped down to 10-15%) Furthermore it had another useful "side effect". I noticed that playing video in Totem or music in RhythmBox would block while the emulator was running. VLC would play video but refuse to play the accompanying soundtrack for the video. As soon as the emulator was killed, music would start playing. Niels' answer to set "Audio playback support" to "no" prevents this issue. I am running Ubuntu 11.04 and Android emulator version 13.0 (build_id OPENMASTER-172639).

Answer 4

One alternative that worths mentioning is Genymotion. It's an android emulator based on VirtualBox, with pre-created images. It supports some features the stock Android emulator isn't very good at, like Wifi 3G, Bluetooth, GPS (with a fancy Google Maps integration, so you don't have to find coordinates manually), multiple screens, etc.

It worth giving it a try at http://www.genymotion.com/