settings for optimizing android emulator

[Dinesh Goud]

android emulator is working too slow any settings for optimizing its performance would be helpful..

[Ulf Dittmer]

The emulator is a lot slower than any device; what do you mean by "too slow"?

[Ron McLeod]

If you are running on a Windows platform with support for hardware virtualization, use the HAXM accelerator (included with the SDK) - it can make a huge difference.

[Heena Agarwal]

For HAXM to install correctly on my Windows 7, I needed to enable some VT-X on my machine. I googled about it and got to know that this is a BIOS setting. I didn't want to change my BIOS settings ( also I don't know how to do that ) but is there an alternative? The emulator is so very slow for me. Its quite frustrating actually.

[Dinesh Goud]

thanks ron ..too slow means it is taking more than a hour for second virtual device..

[Ulf Dittmer]

In that case, something else is going on. Starting up a 2nd emulator instance is not appreciably slower than starting up the first. Maybe the host machine does not have enough RAM?

[Dinesh Goud]

mine is 4 gb ram ulf

[Ulf Dittmer]

That's plenty enough for a Linux or OS X machine as long as no other memory hogs are running (IDEs and such); not sure about Windows.

[Dinesh Goud]

thanks for your response ulf....my is windows ulf..

[Ulf Dittmer]

In that case, use the Task Manager to check how the system is doing in terms of RAM and CPU.

[Heena Agarwal]

Dinesh Goud wrote:thanks ron ..too slow means it is taking more than a hour for second virtual device..

Goodness! It's not that slow for me. By slow I meant like it takes about 2-3 minutes ( or may be 3-4 minutes ) or so for a virtual device to start and initialize on my machine. If I start another emulator, it takes about the same time.

I second Ulf. You must have something else consuming your RAM and CPU.

[Steve Luke]

Heena Agarwal wrote:

Dinesh Goud wrote:thanks ron ..too slow means it is taking more than a hour for second virtual device..

By slow I meant like it takes about 2-3 minutes ( or may be 3-4 minutes ) or so for a virtual device to start

I have a linux box, and any KitKat images with a high number of pixels (>700x1000 or so) never complete opening for me - I have tried to make a KitKat/Nexus 5 AVD and let it try for over a day and it never loaded. Android 4.3 seemed fine (a few minutes) and smaller screen sizes are okay in 4.4. I suspect there is some bug in the scaling as it doesn't seem to be a memory issue (32 GBs RAM and nothing but Eclipse and the AVD running. Almost no RAM or CPU being consumed). I have given up on Android 4.4 AVDs and do my testing on 4.3 at first then move to hardware for testing 4.4.

[Heena Agarwal]

Steve Luke wrote:
I have a linux box, and any KitKat images with a high number of pixels (>700x1000 or so) never complete opening for me - I have tried to make a KitKat/Nexus 5 AVD and let it try for over a day and it never loaded. Android 4.3 seemed fine (a few minutes) and smaller screen sizes are okay in 4.4. I suspect there is some bug in the scaling as it doesn't seem to be a memory issue (32 GBs RAM and nothing but Eclipse and the AVD running. Almost no RAM or CPU being consumed). I have given up on Android 4.4 AVDs and do my testing on 4.3 at first then move to hardware for testing 4.4.

I was not aware of that. Thanks for letting us know. I haven't tried loading any images on my virtual devices yet. But it most certainly will take longer than that on my Windows 7. One day and longer than that... God that would be very, very frustrating.

Edit : When I first read Dinesh's post about it taking an hour, it seemed very unusual in today's world.

[Bill Gorder]

Genymotion is much faster. See the below link for install instructions
https://cloud.genymotion.com/page/doc/

[Heena Agarwal]

Thanks for the advice, Bill. I will try it.