Need information about minimum hardware requirement for better experience in developing Android application.
My current configuration is as follows. P4 3.0 GHz, 512 MB of ram.
Started with Hello Android development on my machine and experience was sluggish, was using Eclipse Helios for development. Emulator used to take lot of time to start. And running program too.
Do I need to upgrade my machine for the development purpose or is there anything else I am missing on my machine(like heavy processing by some other application I might have installed).
And If I do need to upgrade, do I need to upgrade my processor too(that counts to new machine actually, which I am not in favor of), or only upgrading RAM will suffice.
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IMHO it is cpu and RAM dependant. On my Wolfdale (with Intel virtualisation technology) + 4GB of RAM it's very fast and usable. As I know the emu is qemu based so it`s better to have Intel with virtualisation tech enabled and don't forget to insert any virulatisation modules to the kernel (if using linux).
I did the following experiment at home:
let's compare how 2 computers compile the same android application in eclipse. Here are the competitors:
"the monster" - pentinum i7 - 16 gig RAM - solid state hard drive
"peabody" - pentinum i3 - 4 gig RAM
The results: when I compiled the same application in eclipse, the monster and peabody took exactly the same amount of time to bring up the emulator to the point where you have to slide the button to run the app: 1 minute 12 seconds.
After that point, the monster executed the app 30-40 seconds faster than peabody.
The monster costs about $500 more than the peabody. So the question is, is it really worth it? In my opinion, No. I can wait the extra 30-40 seconds
I've just started using Java on Eclipse (Juno) after a 15 year break from Java. I was using the ADK on a 1.6GHz Atom N270 with 4Gb RAM on W7 32bit on a nearly empty disk. Not sure if it is the Atom or whether Java is as bad as it used to be 15 years ago but it takes over 2 minutes for Eclipse to even start. The emulator does turn up eventually but is extremely sluggish. Even without the emulator, Eclipse is sluggish.
On a 1.6GHz Core i7 or a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, operation is reasonable. Emulator works, Eclipse takes about 5 to 10 seconds to be ready for work. Moral of the story: don't use an Atom or any other low powered processor. It is sluggish even with 4Gb memory and having the same clock speed as a high end processor.
I've also tried it in a VMWare VM on the 1.6GHz Core i7 and on the Core 2. It is reasonably fast until the the emulator is started. It then slows down to the point of no return. Redraws is now very much like that of the Atom but at least it responds when the buttons are clicked. Note that it is now running an emulator within an emulator. The only problem with VMs is that every so often W7 does what W7 does. There is a wait cursor and whole machine is totally unresponsive for a minute or two then it springs back to life. This was with VMWare V3. V4/V5 might be different. Varying the number of cores/processors did not make any difference to eclipse or the emulator.
I find identically-specced AVDs run and load far better on my home machine (Phenom II x4 945/8GB RAM/Win7 HP 64bit) than they do on my work machine (Core2Duo/3GB RAM/Ubuntu 11.04 32bit).
As you're essentially running a virtual machine, I would personally go for nothing less than a dual core/4GB, though highly recommend a quad/8GB if you can splash out for that.
Its of no use even if you increase your RAM size because I tried it too. I am using P4 3.00GHz processor and 3 GB RAM(changed from 1 GB to 3GB), But even the Hello world application never turned up.
Its preferable to upgrade your system.
Hey, I have used the same software on an AMD 3Ghz chip, dual core. had 2gbs of ram at the time, and i noticed the emulator ran at an alright speed, but took a ridiculous amount of time to load. I have not done enough development on Android to tell you if this is a common, or even still existing problem, but it is certainly something I remember from my experience.
I use an i5 processor with 4Gb RAM. It works very well. I feel this is the minimum configuration required to run both eclipse and android avd simultaneously. Just an old processor with high RAM is not sufficient.
Have a look at the android SDK system requirements Here
I'm guessing some extra RAM would help your developing experience...Also the emulator does take some time to start on even the speediest systems.
I use DUAL CORE 3-GHZ with 2GB RAM, windows 8 OS.
I can run eclipse and AVD (even running 2 AVD is still good) smoothly, as long as i dont open too much other tabs (Game, Browser, MS Word, etc).
Source: Stackoverflow.com