Increasing the Android SDK emulator speed

Question

How do I increase the speed of the virtual device emulator in the Eclipse SDK for Android app development? I have been searching all over the internet to find out how to speed this thing up, but I can't seem to find a fix that actually works for me. Another problem I'm having is that I can't get the RAM above 1024MB.

Thanks for all the help. I have now fixed the speed. For anyone with the same problem, make sure this box is checked.

However, I still can't get my RAM above 1024 MB. What's the fix for that?

Answer 1

Method I've found which has worked on both my laptop and desktop that I use for development is when you create or edit the Android Emulator (AVD) there is an option near the bottom that says use Host GPU.

I've have found this to work on all Android versions

UPDATE I missed the bit about the RAM problem. You haven't said if there is an error regarding the memory issue, but if you seeing failed to allocate memory: 8 then you need to modify the AVD config.

Go to C:\Users\your_name.android\avd\avd_name\config.ini and find hw.ramSize and make sure that MB is on the end of the number.

Answer 2

If you use an Android virtual device with Intel system image, you can enable HAXM(Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager) to speed up code execution. Take a look at this article: http://developer.android.com/tools/devices/emulator.html#acceleration