Is it just me...or is android honeycomb 3.0 emulator really slow?

Question

Well? I've tried increasing the RAM size of the emulator to 1024 MB and there was little improvement on the speed, however, it's still unusable. It has the speed of a turtle.

Anyone got better ideas to make it faster? Is there something I'm not doing correctly?

Answer 1

Check out the android developer documentation regarding 3.0 emulator performance. Scroll down to About Emulator Performance.

Copied tip for convenience:

Tip: To improve the startup time for the emulator, enable snapshots for the AVD when you create it with the SDK and AVD Manager (there's a checkbox in the AVD creator to Enable snapshots). Then, start the AVD from the AVD manager and check Launch from snapshot and Save to snapshot. This way, when you close the emulator, a snapshot of the AVD state is saved and used to quickly relaunch the AVD next time. However, when you choose to save a snapshot, the emulator will be slow to close, so you might want to disable Save to snapshot after you've acquired an initial snapshot (after you close the AVD for the first time).

Answer 2

Seems like everything 3.0 and beyond is slow for me. Everything before that runs very fast in emulator for me. However, I have an Intel integrated graphics card in my laptop. When I turn 3D setting to "Application Settings," I get relatively decent performance from the emulator, at least when it starts up, but then when I try to start any app from the default main app menu (contacts, for example) I get launcher errors. That happens for me on 3.0, 3.1 and 3.2. The one thing I'm suspicious of is that I'm running 64-bit Java SDK. Seem to be a number of posts out there related to 64-bit, but mostly they seem to be point to using 64-bit SDK with 32-bit Eclipse or vice versa, but in my tests, I am not even running Eclipse, haven't even reinstalled the ADT yet, just the Android SDK and created a few emulator instances. Again, prior to 3.0 everything is fast. 3.0 and beyond not good, but A LOT better with graphics settings as I mentioned above. If I could get past the launcher issues, I think I might be all set. Oh, btw also, for 3.0 and beyond, I bumped the memory up to 1024. I've tried increasing the heap for apps to double the default (from 48 to 96) but that doesn't seem to have alleviated my launcher problems.