Making the Android emulator run faster

Question

The Android emulator is a bit sluggish  For some devices  like the Motorola Droid and the Nexus One  the app runs faster in the actual device than the emulator  This is a problem when testing games and visual effects   How do you make the emulator run as fast as possible  I ve been toying with its parameters but haven t found a configuration that shows a noticeable improvement yet

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Thank you  zest  Worked like a charm  Some things of note   Need to apply Intel s hotfix for the HAXM to deal with kernel panic issue  http   software intel com en-us android articles intel-hardware-accelerated-execution-manager Also  note  if you have more than one abi  you need to uninstall one due to a bug in the latest version of the Android API  r19   https   code google com p android issues detail id 66740  remove armeabi-v7a in this case  since you want the x86 abi   Other than the 45-minutes it took me to resolve these  it was an very rewarding exercise in terms of the increased performance of the emulator

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choose a low resolution emulator  eg  Nexus S  if you don t have a good graphic card  like me

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I recently switched from a core 2   2 5 with 3gb of ram to an i7   1 73 with 8gb ram  both systems ran Ubuntu 10 10  and the emulator runs at least twice as fast now   Throwing more hardware at it certainly does help

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Edit Although using the Intel images gets some performance gains  the performance gained by using Genymotion is much greater  See Paul Lammertsma s answer   Previous Answer  With ADT rev 17 the emulator supports running x86 system images in virtualization mode on Windows and Mac OS X  This has a noticeable impact on performance   ADT rev 17 notes  http   android-developers blogspot jp 2012 03 updated-sdk-tools-and-adt-revision-17 html  Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration  http   developer android com guide developing devices emulator html accel-vm

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Use Genymotion instead of emulator  Genymotion has better performance https   www genymotion com

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On this year google I O  2011   Google demonstrated a faster emulator  The problem is not so much on the byte code between ARM and x86 but the software rendering performed by QEMU  They bypass the rendering of QEMU and send the rendering directly to an X server I believe  They showed a car game with really good performace and fps   I wonder when that will be available for developers

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Official web page   50  faster  Windows    Install  Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator  HAXM      SDK-Manager Extras Install  Intel x86 Atom System Images     SDK-Manager Android 2 3 3 Go to the Android SDK root folder and navigate to extras intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager  Execute file IntelHaxm exe to install   in Android Studio you can navigate to  Settings -  Android SDK -  SDK Tools -  Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator  HAXM installer   Create AVD with  Intel atom x86  CPU ABI Run emulator and check in console that HAXM running  open a Command Prompt window and execute the command  sc query intelhaxm      Also don t forget install this one    P S  during AVD creation add emulation memory  Hardware New Device ram size set up value 512 or more  Linux    Install KVM  open GOOGLE  write  kvm installation   Create AVD with  Intel atom x86  CPU ABI Run from command line  emulator -avd avd name -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm Or run from Eclipse  Run Run Configurations Tab  Target  -   check Intel x86 AVD and in  Additional Emulator Command Line Options  window add  -qemu -m 512 -enable-kvm  click Run      P S  For Fedora  for Ubuntu  OS-X    In Android SDK Manager  install Intel x86 Atom System Image In Android SDK Manager  install Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator  HAXM  In finder  go to the install location of the Intel Emulator Accelerator and install IntelHAXM  open the dmg and run the installation   You can find the location by placing your mouse over the Emulator Accelerator entry in the SDK Manager  Create or update an AVD and specify Intel Atom x86 as the CPU     P S  Check this tool  very convenient even trial

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You could also try the Visual Studio Android Emulator  which can also be installed as a standalone emulator  you don t need Visual Studio   Please note  that it can be installed only on Windows Pro or higher systems

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I hope this will help you   Goto to your BIOS settings  Enable your Virtualization technology in your settings    It solved my problem

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Enable GPU Hardware Acceleration  in addition to Intel s HAXM   if you are using API 15 v3 or newer and SDK Tools v17    Graphics acceleration for the emulator takes advantage of your development computer s graphics hardware  specifically its graphics processing unit  GPU   to make screen drawing faster  This gives a noticeable boost in speed   To enable graphics acceleration enabled by default on your emulator  when creating the AVD  in the Hardware section  click New  select GPU emulation and set the value to Yes   To enable acceleration only at runtime  use the -gpu flag while starting the emulator like this   emulator -avd  lt avd name gt  -gpu on   Source  Google s Using the Emulator tutorial

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Update your current Android Studio to Android Studio 2 0 And also update system images   Android Studio 2 0 emulator runs  3x faster than Android   s previous emulator  and with ADB enhancements you can now push apps and data 10x faster to the emulator than to a physical device  Like a physical device  the official Android emulator also includes Google Play Services built-in  so you can test out more API functionality  Finally  the new emulator has rich new features to manage calls  battery  network  GPS  and more

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Just wanted to say that after I installed the Intel HAXM accelerator and use the Intel Atom image the emulator seems to run 50 times faster  The difference is amazing  check it out   http   www developer com ws android development-tools haxm-speeds-up-the-android-emulator html

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I noticed that the emulator defaults to only Core 0  where most Windows applications will default to  any  core  Also  if you put it on another core  like the last core   it may make the emulator go crazy  If you can  you can try putting your heavy-CPU usage applications on the other CPU cores for a boost in speed   Hardware-wise  get the fastest CPU you can get that works for single-core applications  More than 2 cores might not experience a huge difference in terms of emulator performance    Eclipse   the Android emulator together eat up a ton of RAM  I would recommend 3 gigs of RAM at least because I used a system with 2 gigs of RAM  and it slowed down because the system ran out of RAM and started to use the page file    I feel that the best CPUs for it will probably have a high clock  only use clock as a measure for CPUs in the same series btw   handle non-SIMD operations well  and have a turbo boost mechanism  There aren t many Java-based benchmarks  but overall look for application benchmarks like compression and office  Don t look at gaming or media since those are affected greatly by SIMD  If you find a Java one  even better

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UPDATE  Now that an Intel x86 image is available  the best answer is by zest above   As CommonsWare has correctly pointed out  the emulator is slow because it emulates an ARM CPU  which requires translation to Intel opcodes  This virtualization chews up CPU   To make the emulator faster  you have to give it more CPU  Start with a fast CPU or upgrade if you can   Then  give the emulator more of the CPU you have    Disable Hyperthreading - Since the emulator doesn t appear to utilize more than one core  hyperthreading actually reduces the amount of overall CPU time the emulator will get  Disabling HT will slow down apps that take advantage of multiple CPUs  Hyperthreading must be disabled in your BIOS  Make the emulator run on a CPU other than CPU 0 - This has a much smaller impact than turning off HT  but it helps some  On Windows  you can specify which CPU a process will run on  Many apps will chew up CPU 0  and by default the emulator runs on CPU 0  I change the emulator to run on the last one  Note that on OS X you cannot set affinity  see  https   superuser com questions 149312 how-to-set-processor-affinity-on-a-mac     I m seeing somewhere around a 50  improvement with these two changes in place   To set processor affinity on Windows 7    Open Task Manager Click View All Processes   to run as administrator  otherwise you can t set processor affinity  Right click on emulator exe and choose Set Affinity    On the Set Affinity dialog  select just the last CPU   Note  When you change affinity in this way  it s only changed for the lifetime of the process  Next start  you have to do it again

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Google recently announced a new emulator for Android  It s a much faster and better than the old one  You can find more info about it here

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I would like to suggest giving Genymotion a spin  It runs in Oracle s VirtualBox  and will legitimately hit 60 fps on a moderate system   Here s a screencap from one of my workshops  running on a low-end 2012 model MacBook Air     If you can t read the text  it s a Nexus 7 emulator running at 56 6 fps  The additional  big   bonus is that Google Play and Google Play Services come packaged with the virtual machines    The source of the demoed animation can be found here

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I ve been using the Intel 86  CPU ABI  I created another emulator using the ARM armeabi-v7a  and i found quite an improvement with the speed  I m using platform 4 1 2 API level 16

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Enabling this option worked for me  AVD Manager - gt  Select device and click Edit- gt  Enable the option  Use Host GPU

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I think it is because clr virtual machine uses cpu directly without code opcode translation  It may be optimization for clr application or may be windows mobile window phone 7 started on INTEL proccessor  Android platform based on linux and theoretically you can start android on virtual machine in i686 environment  In this case virtual machines such as vmware could execute some opcodes direcly  But this option will be allowed only if you write on the Java  Because the Java interpret their byte-code or precompile it before execution  see  http   www taranfx com how-to-run-google-android-in-virtualbox-vmware-on-netbooks

[android] Making the Android emulator run faster

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