Android Studio Takes too long time to run the app on real device

Question

I have a Laptop with a Core i3 processor and a 2GB of RAM, and I am using my Sony Xperia C as an alternative to the Emulator. When I click on debug and choose my mobile device, the Gradle starts building and it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to finish. I understand that I have very low resources but I doubt that there is another reason why it takes too long time to finish building and running the app.

I noticed in the logcat tab that it is spending the time on sending a request and waiting for a response repeatedly..

Can anyone tell me if the problem is with the hardware resources or my doubts are true about the cause being something else.

Answer 1

Android Studio is very resource hungry. I use an old Sony with Core 2 Duo and 2.5 GB of RAM, with tweaked system that running about 200MB for the operating system. It takes about 10 minutes or more to build a project.

My suggestion, upgrade your Laptop RAM to 4GB or more. 8GB should be enough. Now I'm working with 4GB and Corei5 where Android Studio take about < 1 minutes to run a project, but it depends of the project size and its dependencies.

-- UPDATE --

Default setting of Windows 10 will use about >90% of your disk which will make your building process much more slower. You could decrease it to <12% by simply turning off "Show Me About Windows":

From the Windows Menu, go to Settings, then go to System and then go to Notifications and Actions. Turn off "Show Me Tips About Windows"

update reference: Disk usage always at 100%

Answer 2

In my case, I don't use debugger for monitoring app performance ...etc, So I do not install app to device (I build application only instead of run), then I use adb to install apk to device ...

adb install -rst <$$path_to>.apk

path_to_apk is where my apk gets built Usually ...

<$$build_path>/android-build/build/outputs/apk/my.apk

I get things work with a reasonable speed , offcourse, on the cost of debugger!
I am then trying how to activate debugging from adb! if possible and needed.

Answer 3

I would strongly recommend that you either upgrade your development machine's RAM (8GB or more) since 2 GB ram will be too painful for studio.

Also I recommend: open single project at a time and clean your project after running your app in emulator every time.

Answer 4

After upgrade your RAM, you should try to upgrade Android Studio. In Android Studio v2.0.0 ++ , they support Instant Run

Android Studio now deploys clean builds faster than ever before. Additionally, pushing incremental code changes to the emulator or a physical device is now almost instantaneous. Review your updates without redeploying a new debug build or, in many cases, without restarting the app.

More info about Instant Run