Android Emulator is so slow that it is unusable

Question

My experience with the Android emulator is that it is so slow that it is unusable. I see threads related to the issue going back over a year. The lack of a coherent response to the question is unacceptable (this is not the Community's fault).

Question: Has anyone that has experienced extreme slowness (more than 15 minutes to launch) actually resolved this issue so that startup is less than a couple of minutes? If so, what did you do?

Please note that I am not trying to tie the emulator to Eclipse. I am teaching mobile web app development using jQTouch. The web apps are testing by running the emulator standalone and opening the Browser.

While my machine is a little dated, I have no trouble running Vista, Office, PowerStudio, etc. Here are details to add to the data around this issue.

• OS: Microsoft Vista, 32-bit
• Processor: Intel Celeron M CPU 520 @ 1.60 GHz
• Memory: 1.5 GB
• Symantec Antivirus - Disabled
• Emulator Start with no animation - did not help
• Startup time in excess of 20 minutes
• Java Version: 1.6.0_21
• AVD Settings: Device RAM size 1024, Snapshot support enabled both in AVD and startup. - ram size and snapshot did not help

Google needs to acknowledge the issue and provide guidance about what development environments actually work. If there were a recommendation for platform, java version, memory, etc., I would follow it.

Right now I have no options other than to tell students that the Android emulator doesn't work. The only android solution is to buy a real phone, which limits testing to a single Android version and configuration.

Students are not having trouble with the iOS simulator running on the Mac.

If someone that works for Google could actually comment, that would be great.

Thanks, Dale

Answer 1

The Android emulator is just that, an emulator -- it is emulating an ARM processor. Emulation will never be as fast as native. Given you are using such a large amount of your computer's memory for the emulator, you are likely having to page consistently, which will add to making the performace suffer.

The iOS simulator on the other hand is just a set of APIs that matches the iOS SDK and pretends to be an iOS device, but is running all code natively on the machine with all the resources, processor speed and memory the machine has, and likely to run significantly faster than running on the actual device.

Answer 2

I have no problem running the Android emulator on my old Core Duo T2400 @ 1.83GHz with 2GB of RAM. The startup time can be a few minutes, but once it is running it works well with only occasional lag.

My desktop with a Core 2 Quad Q6700 @ 2.66GHz with 2GB RAM tears through the emulator.

Both machines have run the emulator under Windows and Linux with varying Java versions getting similar results. My guess is that your processor is a little on the weak side.