Can I tweak my android emulator to make it fast?

Question

I am using the android emulator to run my programs. But its really slow. It takes around 90 seconds to startup and show the home screen. Can I tweak it so that I can reduce this time considerably? Thanks

Answer 1

If you have the mobile device with you, it's much quicker (and more reliable) to compile it via USB to the device. It takes around 5 seconds to compile and install on your phone, I never use the emulator anymore - it's just to slow.

Not only is it slow but anything other than static widgets (animation) will struggle to run on the emulator and you will notice lag.

Answer 2

While developing my game, Elastic World, I was suffering from the same problem. After waiting minutes for the emulator to startup, the game was running at 20 FPS maximum. Even on low end android devices I could easily get 60 FPS.

So I moved to a VMWare Android machine, following the instructions from this site: http://www.android-x86.org/documents/installhowto/

The same game loop now runs at 250 FPS. (it's not playable at this speed and I have the game limited to max 60 FPS, but overriding this limitation it gives 250 FPS)

Answer 3

actually these are all great answers, but have u thought of changing the ram from the default 96mb to something like 512? works for me :)

Answer 4

You need to install Intel HAXM

• open you SDK and install

• Create a new AVD

• Now when run it you should get this

if not then you will need to install Accelerated Execution Manager

See this Running the new Intel emulator for Android on how can you do this

see how much faster do you get Video

Answer 5

1. The -no-boot-anim parameter is good.
2. Don't turn the emulator off, just re-launch your app.
3. For further speedups, try the new snapshot feature, which is described here.

Answer 6

If you absolutely cannot use a physical Android device, what you can do is run the Android OS on Virtualbox, and then get the IP address of the emulated Android. Then you'd connect ADB to the emulator using that IP address. That's the jist of it. I've written a more detailed guide to this approach on my blog. http://www.bobbychanblog.com/2011/07/faster-android-emulator-alternative-using-virtualbox/