Android Emulator: Failed to allocate memory: 8 even with 8MB RAM

Question

I\'m trying to start an emulator, but I keep getting the error Failed to allocate memory: 8.

There are some solutions to this problem, setting the RAM

Answer 1

Solved problem with:

Open config.ini (location: C:\USERS\ YOURUSERNAME\.android\avd ) and set i.e.

hw.ramSize=512

to

hw.ramSize=512mb

Answer 2

Under Windows, no matter how much RAM you have in the PC, it seems setting the emulator around 900MB is about the max it can handle. 1024MB always fails for me with 6GB of RAM and Windows 7 x64.

One other key note, for the device RAM Size, always include "MB" at the end. It seems to randomly works/crashes without it, but works reliably with it. Many pre-built emulators seem to leave this off. For example, use 900MB (no space).

Answer 3

I've had problems like this. The only way to fix it was to set it to either 256, 512 or 1024. I have no idea why it won't work with any random value.

Answer 4

As I mention here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/14420779/1993898

I was able to fix this error by running AVD "as Administrator", with no changes required to my emulator setup. To ensure clarity, my emulator is setup with '1024' in the RAM field, no MB tag needed. Therefore, I believe this error to be related to filesystem permissions, or lack thereof.

Answer 5

You need to access avd config file that resides in:

C:\Users\Furqan\.android\avd\Gingerbread.avd

Here my user name is Furqan and Gingerbread.avd is the name of emulator device there is config.ini file there, you can change ramsize or vm.heapSize=128 hw.ramSize=2048mb

Makesure ramsize should be in mb and similarly you can change any thing in the emulator from here easily.

     avd.ini.encoding=ISO-8859-1
     hw.sdCard=no
     hw.device.manufacturer=Google
     hw.mainKeys=yes
     hw.lcd.density=320
     hw.accelerometer=yes
     hw.dPad=yes
     hw.cpu.arch=arm
     skin.name=720x1280
     abi.type=armeabi
     hw.device.hash=-708107041
     hw.trackBall=no
     hw.device.name=Galaxy Nexus
     hw.camera.back=emulated
     hw.sensors.proximity=yes
     hw.battery=yes
     disk.dataPartition.size=200M
     image.sysdir.1=platforms\android-10\images\
     hw.audioInput=yes
     hw.sensors.orientation=yes
     hw.camera.front=emulated
     hw.gps=yes
     skin.dynamic=yes
     skin.path=720x1280
     hw.keyboard=yes
     vm.heapSize=128
     hw.ramSize=2048mb

Note: hw.ramSize put mb in small case as upper case didnt work for me.