Way to pause the Android Emulator?

Question

I do a lot of development on my laptop, and I use various Android Emulators to do it. When running, the emulator frequently takes up a large amount of my CPU, and consequently decreases my laptop's battery life significantly.

Is there a way to temporarily pause the emulator, or at least shut down whatever it is that's consuming all the unnecessary cpu?

I know that with sdk r9 and later I can snapshot the emulator and quit/restart it fairly quickly, but I'm hoping for something even less invasive to my work flow than that.

Answer 1

In Linux you can stop the process by

$ killall --signal STOP emulator

or

$ killall --signal STOP emulator64-arm

At a later time continue by

$ killall --signal CONT emulator

or

$ killall --signal CONT emulator64-arm

Gotcha: If you update Eclipse, make sure the emulator is not stopped when restarting eclipse. Eclipse will stall when loading, waiting for the stopped emulator to continue.