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 from 1024 to 512, but when I even set it to 8 it still crashes with this error!

What should I do?

Screenshot of the settings:

Here the error message Windows gives of the crashed emulator-arm.exe:

Problem signature:
  Problem Event Name:   APPCRASH
  Application Name: emulator-arm.exe
  Application Version:  0.0.0.0
  Application Timestamp:    4fe779fb
  Fault Module Name:    emulator-arm.exe
  Fault Module Version: 0.0.0.0
  Fault Module Timestamp:   4fe779fb
  Exception Code:   40000015
  Exception Offset: 0014428e
  OS Version:   6.1.7600.2.0.0.768.3
  Locale ID:    1043
  Additional Information 1: ea2b
  Additional Information 2: ea2b4716fbf9f89aacc15214fb1537bb
  Additional Information 3: 8d2f
  Additional Information 4: 8d2f162ccf8522e475fc4fbe036a6efa

The last time I checked and the emulator worked was before updating to ADT 20 and before deleting all old AVD's.

Answer 1

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 2

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.