Minimum Hardware requirements for Android development

Question

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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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

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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

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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

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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

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Firstly  there is an issue with the ADT plugin and Helios which causes lag with looking up Android classes - use Galileo instead  v3 5    Secondly  the emulators become more resource hungry depending on the version of Android you re developing for  Example  I have a P4 2 4GHz  1GB RAM PC with Win XP 32-bit and an Android v2 2 emulator takes at least 4-5 minutes to load up  An Android v1 6 emulator on the other hand loads up in less than 1 minute  Remember though that once the emulator is up and running  you can leave it loaded and it will be more responsive than first use   Also bear in mind that if you give your emulator a 2GB SD card  for example  it will try to create that through virtual memory if there isn t enough physical memory

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

[android] Minimum Hardware requirements for Android development

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