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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

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

Answer 3

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/

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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)

Answer 6

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.