Xcode 8 simulator slow & laggy while building app

Question

Xcode iOS simulator running incredibly slow while app is building. UI and response is very laggy.

I am using Xcode 8.0 release on OSX 10.11.6

Has anyone else experienced this? If so anyone have any solutions?

Answer 1

The iOS Simulator does not have access to the GPU. It makes use of the CPU for all rendering.

Compilation takes up a ton of your CPU and disk I/O bandwidth.

Given that, you should expect the simulator to run slower than normal than when you're not compiling because it is getting resource starved by the compilation.