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

use those 3 options.

emulator --cpu-delay 0 --no-boot-anim --cache ./cache --avd avd_name

the first two are obvious. the third one will make the memory of the emulator kind of persistent. you can point it to any file that does not get destroyed by boot (such happens with /tmp) it's like a always-on hibernating device.

Answer 2

Try to use a smaller resolution for your emulator as for example HVGA. The emulator gets slower the more pixels its needs to render as it is using software rendering.

Also if you have sufficient memory on your computer, add at least 1 GB of memory to your emulator. This is the value "Device ram size" during the creation of the AVD.

Also set the flag "Enabled" for Snapshots. This will save the state of the emulator and let it start much faster.

Answer 3

I was having a similar problem (thread here). However, mine was taking 10-15 mins. 90 seconds is blazing fast considering a lot of threads in the Android discussion groups. The emulator is slow by nature and the only recommendation I read was to keep the emulator open instead of closing it and rerunning it. However, as mentioned in my thread, if you have a physical Android device, you can just run it on that. It's what I'm doing at the moment and it was top-notch advice. No long waiting time. If you don't have a physical device, then I can only suggest you don't close the emulator between code changes, as the system will recognise the change.

Answer 4

I recommend you to use Genymotion . It's a very fast emulator (less than 10 seconds to run in my case)

It has Google Apps installed also including Google Play App which give the chance to download any app. This is a good feature for testing apps with Maps Api.

Answer 5

Scaling the emulator down made my emulator load faster...

emulator -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim -cache ./cache -scale 0.8 -avd avd_name

Answer 6

Just enable "Snapshot" checkbox in your AVD Manager. It will save the state of your AVD when you close it. So, once you run the emulator again, that saved state will be loaded. Hence the boot up time of your AVD will be considerably reduced.