Why is the Android emulator so slow How can we speed up the Android emulator

Question

I have got a 2 67   GHz Celeron processor  and 1 21   GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine  My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine  but for me  it doesn t  I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE  SDKs  JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly  but that is very rare  How can I  if possible  fix this problem  Even if it starts and loads the home screen  it is very sluggish  I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3 5  Galileo  and 3 4  Ganymede

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UPDATE  The latest version of Android studio  2 x  made major improvements to the bundled emulator   It s responsive and has a whole bunch of features    For those still interested  Try using Genymotion   You can download a version for Windows Mac OS X Linux after registering   A plugin for Eclipse is also available      The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to  Help   Install New Software  menu  then just add a new Update Site with the following URL  http   plugins genymotion com eclipse  Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse    This emulator is fast and responsive    GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level  signal strength  and GPS  The latest version now also contains camera tools

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The option -cpu-delay  lt delay gt  described in Emulator Startup Options can help

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Try Genymotion for Android Studio  Blazing fast  Just needs one time installation  No more AVD pain

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IMPORTANT NOTE  Please first refer to the Intel list about VT to make sure your CPU supports Intel VT   HAXM Speeds Up the Slow Android Emulator  HAXM stands for -  Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager   Currently  it supports only Intel   VT  Intel Virtualization Technology    The Android emulator is based on QEMU  The interface between QEMU and the HAXM driver on the host system is designed to be vendor-agnostic     Steps for Configuring Your Android Development Environment for HAXM   Update Eclipse  Make sure your Eclipse installation and the ADT plug-in are fully up-to-date  Update your Android Tools  After each Eclipse plug-in update  it is important to update your Android SDK Tools  To do this  launch the Android SDK Manager and update all the Android SDK components  To take advantage of HAXM  you must be on at least release version 17       Download the x86 Atom System Images and the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager Driver  Follow the image below       Install the HAXM Driver by running  IntelHaxm exe   It will be located in one of the following locations    C  Program Files Android android-sdk extras intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager C  Users  lt user gt  adt-bundle-windows-x86 64 sdk extras intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager   If the installer fails with the message that Intel VT must be turned on  you need to enable this in the BIOS  See the description for how to do this in Enabling Intel VT  Virtualization Technology         Create a new x86 AVD  Follow the image below       Or as for new SDK

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I just started yesterday on Windows nbsp 7 and was facing the same problem  The easiest solution  I found and is working for me is to use the low config device in the emulator  I used Nexus One instead of Nexus 7 and select the snapshot for the device in Android Virtual Device   And  also important is to leave open the emulator  It works both in Eclipse and Android Studio   In a window  it says snapshot does not generally work when RAM is more than  700  So  selecting a lower configured one easily help to test Hello World and then for developing your application  Later  we can test on a high-end device    For me  virtualization support does not work as my hardware does not support it

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The emulator included in your  old  version of Eclipse is very slow   Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010  Update your SDK IDE   Personally  I use a real phone to do my tests  It is faster and tests are more realistic  But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don t want to buy several phones  you will have to use the emulator from time to time

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HAXM is a way to make emulators fast for intel processors HAXM is the kernel driver part  and the user-space emulator part is based on QEMU - which means there is a branch of QEMU which uses HAXM  This QEMU branch is very android-emulator-specific  and also seems to be based on older version of QEMU     But still when i used with my intel core i3 processor with 4 GigaBytes RAM it doesn t effect more to speed  So this wasn t a solution for me   As i am using 4GB RAM cpu Emulator becomes RAM eater but for making it more convenient there are some ways I prefer Android 86 support based emulator  And as android studio now introduce Instant-Run So After first launch app installation became faster  but i always faced problem and seems like no-way to get out of this   I also used Droid4x and it goes preety convenient to me but i can t found a way to install different api versions  I used it with kitkat and it was faster then android emulator and it is also VT support enabled  So  i found another way and a good solution that is Visual Studio Emulator You can read more about it here   The latest i used is LeapDroid its really a powerful See the comparisons here   I prefer to use Real device then emulators on 4GB ram PCs

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Try Android x86  It s much faster than the Google Android emulator  Follow these steps    Install VirtualBox  Download the ISO file that you need  Create a virtual machine as Linux 2 6 Other Linux  512 nbsp MB RAM  HD 2 nbsp GB  Network  PCnet-Fast III  attached to NAT  You can also use a bridged adapter  but you need a DHCP server in your environment  Install Android x86 on the emulator  run it  Press Alt F1  type netcfg  remember the IP address  press Alt F7  Run cmd on your Windows nbsp XP system  change the directory to your Android tools directory  type adb connect  lt virtual machine IP gt   Start Eclipse  open the ADT plugin  find the device  and enjoy

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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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Enabling snapshot may not make it faster in the first run  do not go for big SD size  Adjust the SD card size to 100 nbsp MB in the first run

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For fast testing   lt 1 second  use buildroid with VirtualBox s first network card set to    host only network    and then run  C  Program Files  x86  Android android-sdk platform-tools gt adb connect         5555 connected to         5555       DOS   bash  v     adb connect         5555 connected to         5555   where            is the buildroid IP address you get by clicking the buildroid app in buildroid main screen

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Firstly  you need to upgrade your RAM to atleast 8GB   If you cannot upgrade your RAM  then try running the application on your Android Phone by connecting it via Data Cable and USB Debugging set as ON   Also  you may use some other emulators like GenyMotion or Nox   However  with the amount of RAM that you seem to be having  even other emulators may tend to be slow

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You can download the genymotion emulator from here  This is fast and efficient

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I would suggest playing around with the OpenGL settings  I have a dual-core  quad-thread  i3-2350M running on it s internal GPU  and I get terrible performance if I use SwiftShaders  but changing it to  Desktop Native OpenGL   Extended Controls  gt  Settings  gt  OpenGL ES Renderer  makes it run smoothly   If the device doesn t boot  play around with the OpenGL ES API Level setting and the GPU emulation setting in the device config   I don t know why  but on my 2011 Intel processor  it makes a world of difference

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Simple easy solution for beginners  I have tried many ways and stopped with Genymotion in combination with Eclipse  Genymotion simply adds a virtual device to Eclipse   Step by step    Download Genymotion with VirtualBox included from here  Install this package included build in VirtualBox  Install the plugin into Eclipse from here  Start GenyMotion and create a virtual device you want use  and start it  In Eclipse  go to Window -  Preferences -  GenyMobile -  GenyMotion  and set the path to GenyMotion  in my case  C  ProgramFiles GenyMobile Genymotion   Click on a project name in Eclipse that you want to start  Start the application using  Run as   In the list of devices  you should see the emulated device  You cam emulate what you want    In my case  this solution is the one and only fast solution  No emulators in Eclipse have never worked so fast  and every setting was very slow  Only this solution works almost in realtime  I can recommend  notebook i3  2 6 nbsp GHz

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A few things that definitely sped things up for me with this were  1  delegating the rendering process to the GPU by checking  Use Host GPU  checkbox in AVD s edit window   2  downloading the Intel Atom  x86  image or if you are a windows mac user downloading the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator HAXM  Unfortunately the thing with Intel x86 images is that you don t get Google Apps  they only come with ARM images   which is where Genymotion comes in handy   Download and install VirtualBox  For Windows users it s not necessary to install VirtualBox separately  because it is available from the Genymotion site  bundled with the Genymotion emulator  Go to Genymotion website and sign up  You ll receive a validation mail  so just click on the validation link to proceed  Download and install the Genymotion emulator  Start Genymotion  You might need to configure path to your Android SDK location in Genymotion settings  probably if you ve installed SDK in a non default location   Since this is a first start  there are no devices  Click on  Add  and download new device  To see available devices  write your credentials in the pop-up dialog and click  Connect   Select the device and click  Start

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I had the same problem  but I fixed it by deleting the  android folder from C  Users User    Now everytime I start Eclipse or AVD  I delete that folder  After that my AVD boots up in 20 to 30 seconds and the emulator works smoothly with a negligible lag      OPTIONAL   If the problem still persists  try to clone the NEXUS S   AVD

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I wonder why nobody has mentioned the Visual Studio Emulator as an alternative  It s way faster than the native Android Studio Emulator    Here s a link to performance comparison  https   medium com android-news how-visual-studio-emulator-for-android-can-improve-your-android-development-9e17a6213839  hlh7ba6ut    What s even better is that the apk files and even gapps  or any other flashable zip  can be installed just by drag and drop  However  the downside is that it requires Hyper-V which is only available on Windows  that too  from Windows 8 onwards   Other limitations  along with the description of the above  and other details can be found here  https   blogs msdn microsoft com visualstudioalm 2014 11 12 introducing-visual-studios-emulator-for-android

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To add further information to this   I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu nbsp 10 04 LTS  Lucid Lynx  which in turn updated my Java version to   Java version  1 6 0 20  Java TM  SE Runtime Environment  build 1 6 0 20-b02  Java HotSpot TM  64-Bit Server VM  build 16 3-b01  mixed mode    And now the emulator  although takes a while to start  seems to be running faster than previously   It might be worth people upgrading their JVM

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Gone were those days  when we used to run projects on slow Android Emulators  Today  Android Emulators are on steroids   Yeah you heard me  No other emulators are as fast as Android Emulators  You can go to my blog for more details   http   androidveteran blogspot in 2016 01 android-emulator-multi-touch html  I have explained in details about new Android Emulators  Check it out   Believe me they are as fast as your real device works

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I just took the default Android 3 1  and it was very slow  but since I realised my code was Android 2 3 3 compatible I switched to that  It s about 50  quicker and also the emulator looks more like my phone  and has a keyboard permanently displayed so that it is easier to use

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Remove unwanted activation of some of the plugins at start-up by going to windows-- preference-- General-- Startup and shutdown  Also make sure you don t use those plugins in any of your views  Eclipse is not a word processor  Better to disable the spell check  Disabling spell check will reduce the eclipse burden by going to Windows-- Preference-- General-- Editors --  Text Editors-- Spelling  When eclipse builds the project  it will delete all output folders and rebuild classes built by other compilers  We can disable such features  as deleting the output folders and rebuilding will take sometime  Goto Windows-- Preference-- Java-- Compiler-- Building  Disabling label decorations which is of less use for you  will also help you to gain some performance   Goto Windows-- Preference-- General-- Appearance-- Label Decorations  Close unwanted projects and use working set option to move from one group of project to another smoothly   You could also disable Eclipse automatic building  if it is not needed for you  Goto Project-- Build Automatically  uncheck it   Do not keep lot of tabs opened in the editor  Better to have around 20 tabs   Regularly close the unused tabs  To open resource we can always use ctrl shift R and ctrl shift T  java resource  instead of opening lot of tabs  Disable unwanted plugins  Full J2EE eclipse version has an option to disable uninstall plugins  Goto Help-- Software Updates-- Manage Configuration  Right click on any installed plugin to get disable option  If this option is not available then enable Classic Update by going to Windows-- Preference-- Capabilty and check classic update  Now the manage configuration option should be available in help menu

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The older Android versions run a lot faster   When I m on my netbook  I use Android 1 5  API level 3    There are a couple of drawbacks  though--your apps need to support the older platforms  obviously   and ndk-gdb requires running Android 2 2  API level 8  or higher   But regularly testing apps against older platforms is a good idea anyway

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Try reducing screen size  and maybe you should consider using Ubuntu  I ve had the same issue  and somehow my emulator on the same PC works five times faster when using Linux

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The use of Android x86 provides better productivity than the Android emulator   Whereas working with Android x86 4 2  it provides extremely fast debugging compared to Android emulator  It s many many times faster for configuration  It is working with the latest Android X86 4 2  Jelly Bean  and VirtualBox   I have found different ways to connect with the Internet and ADB   Step  1  Selection of Adapters  CASE 1  Only Internet  NAT Adapter   The easiest solution is just use a NAT adapter that will directly connect you to the Internet if the host is connected to the Internet  but you won t get the ADB connection with this setup   Here you will get a public IP address  so you can t connect to the host computer     Case 2  Only ADB  host-only adapter   The easiest solution is just use the host-only adapter     Note  The default host-only adapter may not work due to DHCP server settings  Either create a new HostOnlyAdapter or run DHCP server for existing an adapter   Case 3  For both ADB and Internet  bridge adapter   You will have to take care in this case   If you are using LAN for the Internet connection you shall use the bridge adapter with your Ethernet card  It will give you a local IP address and the virtual machine will connect to the Internet using the host machine   Alternatively if you are with Wi-Fi  just do the same by selecting the Wi-Fi adapter   For other types of connection  you shall go with the same way     Step  2 Connection with ADB  To check the IP address  just press Alt F1  for a console Window    To switch back to the graphics view  press Alt F7    You will see the console window  Type netcfg   It will show the IP address   Now move on to your host  run the command prompt  and move to the adb directory   type adb connect  lt your IP address gt    Example     adb connect 192 168 1 51   Note  If ADB is not running or responding you can do the following   adb kill-server  adb start-server   You can check devices connected to ADB   adb devices   For the original question  click here

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If you can  switch to using Ubuntu for Android development  I switched to Ubuntu 14 04 LTS for Android development  and I am glad that I took the jump  All of the steps mentioned made little or no difference in the lag on Windows  Linux is the correct answer to all the problems you are facing

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Short answer  because of the ARM -  x86 instruction translations  The Emulator works in a similar fashion to a virtual machine that is tasked with booting a full fledged OS and running your test application afterwards  The ARM -  x86 translations can be very time consuming  less for your app  but more for when the OS is booting  it s proportional to complexity and number of instructions involved    Some suggested running the code on x86 emulators  What this means is instead of loading an ARM based OS  you load an x86 variant that will run faster on your x86 machine  as no ARM- x86 translation are necessary  Still  this is not a perfect solution   Android applications that use NDK and come packed with native libs    so  compiled for ARM  will not work on x86 emulators  so such programs will fail to run  But if you get to that point and get to deal with NDK native JNI code  you probably know enough about emulators already

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The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle  This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses  As a workaround  I pass -icount auto to QEMU when starting the emulator  You can make a batch file called my avd bat to do it for you   emulator  my avd -no-boot-anim -qemu -icount auto    my avd -- launch a virtual device named  my avd  -no-boot-anim -- disable animation for faster boot -qemu args    -- pass arguments to qemu -icount  N auto  -- enable virtual instruction counter with 2 N clock ticks per instruction   This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install tenfold

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Update You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator  That will save emulator state  and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot  Click on Emulator edit button  then click Show Advanced Setting  Then enable Quick Boot like below screenshot   Android Development Tools  ADT  9 0 0  or later  has a feature that allows you to save state of the AVD  emulator   and you can start your emulator instantly  You have to enable this feature while creating a new AVD or you can just create it later by editing the AVD  Also I have increased the Device RAM Size to 1024 which results in a very fast emulator  Refer to the given below screenshots for more information   Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature     Launching the emulator from the snapshot    And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator   Using ssd hard drive has too much impact and I recommend to use more suitable ram  8 or higher

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My solution is Vysor   I get both of the best worlds  I don t put too much charge on my machine  but I can also see my real Android device on the screen so I don t have to reach for it  take my hands off the keyboard etc   Furthermore there are always some feature that don t work best on an emulator    There is free version with ads and a payed one which compared to other solutions  won t break the bank

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You need more memory   Here s why I say that   I m using VirtualBox on Windows to run Ubuntu 10 10 as a guest  I installed Eclipse and the Android SDK on the VM  My physical box has 4 nbsp GB of memory  but when I first configured the Ubuntu virtual machine  I only gave it 1 nbsp GB  The emulator took about 15 minutes to launch  Then  I changed my configuration to give the VM 2 nbsp GB and the emulator was running in less than a minute

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I just noticed something I can t explain  but hey  for me it works   I was compiling Android from sources anyway and the built-in emulator started in a few seconds  my machine is dual core AMD 2 7 nbsp GHz  and in a minute  perhaps two at the first run  the system was up  Using Eclipse ADT bundle  on the other hand  resulted in half an hour of emulator startup  Unacceptable    The solution that works here  I have no means to test it on other machines  so if you feel inclined  test and verify     Download and build Android SDK on your machine  It may take some time  you know  compilation of whole system is tiresome   Instructions can be found here     Initializing Downloading  Building  I changed commands to  lunch sdk-eng  and  make sdk -j4   besides that build tips are useful  especially concerning ccache and -jN option   When done  run  android  and the SDK manager should appear  Download tools and desired platform packages  If commands are not found  try rerunning    build envsetup sh  and  lunch sdk-eng  commands to set up pathes  they are lost after exiting a terminal session  Run  emulator  to check how fast it starts up  For me it s MUCH faster than the Eclipse-bundled one  If that works  point Eclipse to the SDK you just compiled  Window-Preferences-Android in left pane -  choose SDK location  It should be dir with  tools  subdir and something in  platforms  subdir  For me it s  lt source base dir gt  out host linux-x86 Apply OK  restart Eclipse if needed  If it does not complain about anything  run your Android app  In my case  the emulator starts in a few seconds and finishes boot in under a minute  There is still a bit delay  but it entirely acceptable for me    Also  I agree with running from snapshot and saving state to snapshot  My advice concerns only emulator startup time  I still have no idea why it is so long by default  Anyway  if that works for you  enjoy

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Using the ADB utility I ve discovered some more information that is important    The emulator is actually running  but it seems like the graphical interface may be the problem   When the Android splash screen is up and you are waiting forever it looks like the following    The emulator is actually running because you can run the following command-line tool and see the listed processes   adb -s emulator-5554 shell ps    That will provide you with a list of processes which are running on the device  which seems stuck    I piped the output to a file and here is a list of all the running processes   USER     PID   PPID  VSIZE  RSS     WCHAN    PC         NAME  root      1     0     696    500   c02ae25a 0805a406 S  init root      2     0     0      0     c02315a2 00000000 S kthreadd root      3     2     0      0     c021f9dc 00000000 S ksoftirqd 0 root      5     2     0      0     c022e8d7 00000000 S kworker u 0 root      6     2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S khelper root      7     2     0      0     c022e8d7 00000000 S kworker u 1 root      255   2     0      0     c02886de 00000000 S sync supers root      257   2     0      0     c028935e 00000000 S bdi-default root      259   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S kblockd root      267   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S ata sff root      278   2     0      0     c04f610f 00000000 S khubd root      283   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S md root      297   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S cfg80211 root      298   2     0      0     c022e8d7 00000000 S kworker 0 1 root      413   2     0      0     c0283057 00000000 S kswapd0 root      481   2     0      0     c02cd713 00000000 S fsnotify mark root      501   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S crypto root      590   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S iscsi eh root      611   2     0      0     c048aa21 00000000 S mtdblock0 root      619   2     0      0     c048aa21 00000000 S mtdblock1 root      627   2     0      0     c048aa21 00000000 S mtdblock2 root      666   2     0      0     c022e8d7 00000000 S kworker 0 2 root      700   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S binder root      724   2     0      0     c022e085 00000000 S deferwq root      725   1     624    348   c02ae25a 0805a406 S  sbin ueventd root      932   2     0      0     c055236e 00000000 S mmcqd 0 root      939   2     0      0     c0340f30 00000000 S yaffs-bg-1 root      941   2     0      0     c0340f30 00000000 S yaffs-bg-1 root      942   2     0      0     c0340f30 00000000 S yaffs-bg-1 system    943   1     1340   400   c056a35d b76a1eb6 S  system bin servicemanager root      944   1     5540   924   ffffffff b7646c11 S  system bin vold root      947   1     1548   504   c05785ce b766c163 S  system bin debuggerd radio     948   1     6420   1016  ffffffff b76d3c11 S  system bin rild system    949   1     20088  2876  ffffffff b7655eb6 S  system bin surfaceflinger drm       951   1     10480  2920  ffffffff b7585eb6 S  system bin drmserver keystore  954   1     5036   1416  c056a35d b765deb6 S  system bin keystore root      955   1     1324   440   c02d0083 b76b28ab S  system bin qemud shell     958   1     1428   668   c03e9ad9 b767fa76 S  system bin sh root      959   1     4680   304   ffffffff 08063530 S  sbin adbd graphics  1012  1     17980  4276  ffffffff b7652eb6 S  system bin bootanimation media     4743  1     25288  6232  ffffffff b75beeb6 S  system bin mediaserver root      4744  1     3944   1164  00000000 b7628976 R  system bin netd root      4770  4744  0      0     c021de78 00000000 Z iptables root      4771  959   1768   540   00000000 b766fa76 R ps   For fun I then ran the following command and killed the  Android  animation   adb -s emulator-5554 shell kill 1012   The splash screen became blank so something is really happening   I tried and succeeded at killing some other processes and that made me feel good but the emulator still didn t ever seem to start   Oh well  I m running a QuadCore i7 with 8Gb of ram   Also running the haxm with the settings described in other posts in this question   Note  I m updating this on 09 19 2014 - I learned that this odd behavior where the emulator would attempt to start the instance but never would was all related to the file rights on the emulator files   They were set to read-only because of the way they were copied  so the emulator attempts to install and write to its  virtual disk  but it s  virtual disk  is really a file or set of files which my OS has set to read-only and so it fails   These failures cause the emulator to never start   I set the files to full access and the emulator starts up in record time

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You can create emulator bat with following command to start the emulator  It will start faster   emulator exe -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim   lt avd name gt    Or on Unix  Mac or Linux flavors    emulator -cpu-delay 0 -no-boot-anim   lt avd name gt

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Android emulator is dead slow  It takes 800MB memory while running  If you are on Windows  You can use Microsoft Android Emulator  It is superb  provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator  And most important it is fast   consumes 13MB only   It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview  I am using it and happy with it  I downloaded and installed entire VS pack  I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only   Visual Studio Emulator for Android  EDIT  Try https   www visualstudio com vs msft-android-emulator

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I would insist you to install BlueStacks now as it works the same as the emulator with many other functionalities in that  for example  it gives access to Android Market   Also you can run applications directly from Eclipse to BlueStack Device Emulator with a great performance speed  It just takes a fraction of second to run your application from Eclipse to the BlueStack emulator

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I had intermittent slow emulator  SDK v8 0  load times  up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2 67 nbsp GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10 04 VirtualBox 3 2 12 guest with Eclipse  3 6 1  loaded  I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 nbsp MB to 2048 nbsp MB and from that point on  I never experienced the slowness again  load times consistent at 33 seconds  CPU load consistent at 20    Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs

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I suggest you to use the Android phone for developing by USB Debugging  It gives better experience in testing the apps and a better output compared to virtual devices  Or you can also use the options mentioned in rest of the answers and can go with Bluestacks App Player  it is also a good option in case of non-availability of Android Device

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For a better experience  I would recommend the shop genymotion com licensed genymotion  If you want to test it out  first you can get genymotion here

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Emulators are slow  There s really nothing you can do about it  but there are alternatives to the emulator    Genymotion - Preferred VirtualBox BlueStacks YouWave Windows Android Emulator Jar of Beans Andy   To make your emulator faster  you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version  Android 2 3  Gingerbread    Developing on a Mac would be better  Why use an emulator  BTW  Using a real phone makes more sense

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Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2 0 version and then go to app open Settings Preferences  the go to Build  Execution  Deployment   Instant Run  Click on Enable Instant Run  And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run    And Instant run will look like this    However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now

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You may try Genymotion instead of android emulator  It is faster and better than the android emulator

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I ve noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there s no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server  DDMS  connected  So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager  SDK Setup exe  and Eclipse is not started  the emulator works faster   If you start the emulator from Eclipse  DDMS is there  so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow  but sometimes it s faster

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Try using the Intel X86 Atom Storage Image for a relatively faster boot up than using ARM based images when emulating the device   Another thing to be taken into the notice is that according to your system configuration  running an Android emulator with 1 21 nbsp GB RAM can be a sluggish experience  because the emulator requires up to some certain percentage of RAM which is used for emulating the device  not forgetting about the RAM used by the ADT   Try a system image of 2 1 - 2 3 3 for at least a runnable experience  Plus not forgetting about Save to Snapshot for quicker loading  Though the first load may take time  But saving to a snapshot definitely saves up some time

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Android studio 2 02 has been launched  it has faster emulators  if you want to go with third party  use Genymotion emulators  they are pretty fast

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A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android--it s fast  Hyper-V  x86  and free to download even without VS

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Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator  First  install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator  HAXM   This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager   In the SDK Manager  it s located under Extras     In the version of Android Studio I used  0 8 9   Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn t actually run the installer  I assume this will be fixed in later releases   To run the installer I had to go to C  Program Files  x86  Android android-studio sdk extras intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager and manually launch intelhaxm exe   HAXM works with Intel devices  so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU   Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86  This improved things considerably  but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish  The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager  AVD      After these changes  Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag  Be aware that these features are hardware dependent  CPU GPU  and may not work on some systems

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Android emulator release 9 has a new  snapshot  feature  You can save the state of the emulator  make an image of the emulator  and avoid booting when you start the emulator

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After developing for a while  my emulator became brutally slow  I chose wipe user data  and it was much much better  I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you ve deployed

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Now on ADT 21  it provides more options for a fast emulator    You should use 512 nbsp MB RAM  lower CPU Time  Device Selection and VM Heap Size high  For better results  you should use Intel Atom in CPU ABI    Using Snapshot and CPU Host may not increase your speed of the emulator  but there are useful ones for other purposes

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I tried booting the emulator from Eclipse  Indigo and Android 1 5  no Snapshot  and after 45 minutes I stopped it  because nothing had happened   Statistics  Phenom Quad  2 6 nbsp MHz with 4 nbsp GB DDR2 Corsair Dominator  800 nbsp MHz  The AVD is on an SSD drive and the emulator on a 7200 nbsp RPM HDD   I started the emulator manually with the -no-boot-anim option and it loaded in 30 seconds      In CMD  navigate to folder where the emulator exe file is and type  emulator exe   lt YourAVDFromEclipse gt  -no-boot-anim   The emulator exe file is located in the Android SDK folder under Tools   In Windows  you can find the the Android Virtual Device AVD  under C  Users  lt NAME gt   android avd   The projects run from inside Eclipse  targeting the AVD you booted  show up just nicely  D

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To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the  Disable Boot Animation  before starting the emulator  Refer to the Android documentation   If in case you don t know  you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run debug your app  If you click run debug when it s already open  your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately  Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time   Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator  How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400

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Android Studio performance is greatly optimized in Linux  Windows system might be running different heavy programs in background  Linux is best suited to use available system resources efficiently  Recently I have install android studio in Kali Linux  The speed of emulator and studio performance is way better than windows    And the software development tools gets downloaded faster from android SDK  As the packages are bundled in binary files  The size of binary files are low

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I have noticed that an emulator gets slow over a period of time  So  one can delete the emulator which gets very slow and create a new one with the help of the AVD manager  I have tried it a couple of times and it works well

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This is what has worked for me    Setting AVD RAM to 512 nbsp MB Setting SD card memory to 10 nbsp MB Setting a large SD card memory size is one of the biggest causes of a slow AVD

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Try to reduce the screen size of the emulator while creating a new Android virtual device   I have seen that this will launch the emulator very fast compared to the default options provided in AVD manager

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Android ADT 18 now includes a  beta  GPU enabled option  simply enable the GPU acceleration from your AVD properties   It makes a huge difference and even ICS feels relatively comfortable now

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If you have an Intel CPU  install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager   Then assign it as the emulator s CPU in Emulator Settings  When I did it on my Core nbsp i7 CPU  it was taking about 10 minutes  Now it is opening in 15 seconds

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Intel released recommended installation instructions for the ICS emulator on May 15  2012   This worked for me  The emulator is now fast and the UI is smooth   The first half of the instructions are detailed enough  so I will assume you were able to install the Intel x86 Atom System Image s  using the Android SDK manager  as well as Intel HAXM   Now to ensure that everything else is set up so you can enjoy a highly performing emulator    Install Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager  HAXM    And start it   sudo kextload -b com intel kext intelhaxm  mac    If HAXM is working properly  you may see this message when launching the emulator      HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virtual mode   Otherwise  you may see this error      HAX is not working and the emulator runs in emulation mode emulator     Failed to open the hax module    Use GPU emulation   You cannot use the Snapshot option when using GPU emulation as of this writing   Ensure that GPU emulation is set to  yes   Set the device memory to 1024 nbsp  MB or more  but not more than the Intel HAXM setting  I use 1024 nbsp  MB per device and 2048 for HAXM    Always double-check the settings after saving   The emulator is very picky about what it allows you to set  and it will revert configurations without telling you   With these settings the software keyboard no longer appears  nor do the on-screen back  menu  and recent keys  This appears to be a limitation of the current ICS Intel x86 system image  You will need to use the keyboard shortcuts   On Mac OS you will need to hold fn   control for the F1 - F12 keys to work  Page up down left right can be performed using control   arrow keys

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The fastest emulators at the moment of writing this are the built-in x86 emulators which come with the Android SDK  You can find them in AVD manager where you create virtual machines  Simply pick any of them and then you pick the type of CPU  choose x86 for best performance   It will be as fast as your machine    The latest such machine for Android 4 0 and 4 0 3 can be found in Giving your Android Emulator a Boost  Building Android ICS with Goldfish  amp  x86 KVM support on EC2 - TestObject   Note  This is only for a development purpose  To test for performance  you still have to either use a real device or test on the emulator with ARM CPU

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You can try our new Android virtual machine  Leapdroid  which is fully compatible with the original Android emulator  Since it uses virtualization technology  instead of emulation  it provides pretty much native speed  In addition  we use a new OpenGL technology called LeapGL  which performs OpenGL graphics in native speed  Our vm has the best performance compared to others   http   www leapdroid com  Source code  https   github com leapdroid  Leapdroid is fully compatible with Eclipse and Android Studio  as it uses the same adb ports

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You can review the emulator issues on the Google I O 2011  Android Development Tools talk  starting a 0 40 20   The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well   The main choking point is rendering since it s not running on any dedicated hardware but it s actually being performed through software rendering  Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance  Getting more faster memory isn t going to help   They ve mentioned  at the time  that they re developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware  so eventually  you ll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware

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Well  since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative testing emulator  I ll also present my favorite  This might not be an alternative for everyone  but for me it s perfect    Use the Bluestacks Player  It runs Android 2 3 4 and is very fluid and fast  Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device  The only downside is  that you can just test apps on the API Level 10 and just on one screen size  but it s perfect just for testing if it s working or not  Just connect the Player with the adb by running  adb connect 127 0 0 1    After compiling  it installs instantly  It is very impressive  considering I have rather an average computer hardware  dual core with 4 nbsp  GB of RAM

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The current  May 2011  version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3 0  Honeycomb  primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL -- this means that the GL code gets translated into software  ARM software  in fact  which then gets emulated in software in QEMU  This is crazy-slow  They re working on this problem and have it partially solved  but not with any sort of release quality   Check out the video Google I O 2011  Android Development Tools to see it in action -- jump to about 44 minutes

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Here s what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all    Assign all available processors to the emulator   Here s what you can try  It does speed up the emulator for me  especially during loading time  I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU  I set it to use all available processors   I m using Windows 7      When the Android emulator is starting  open up the Task Manager  look under the Process tab  look for  emulator-arm exe  or  emulator-arm exe  32     Right click on it  select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator

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On a 3 4 nbsp GHz quad core 6 nbsp GB of RAM  Windows 7  the emulator was unusably slow  I downloaded Launcher-Pro apk through the emulator  installed it and set it as the default launcher  It doubled my emulation speed  The screens load much smoother and faster  It doesn t seem to download in 2 1 or 2 2  only in 2 0

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In AVD Manager select the VD and click edit  set the resolution to little as you are able to read the text on VD   I use 800x600 pixels  RAM set to 512 nbsp MB  and it works like a charm without high use of CPU time

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The startup of the emulator is very slow   The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once   If the emulator is already running and you run your app again  the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly   Of course  if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone  it is best to test it on a real phone

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Try to disable your antivirus  Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster

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I ve similar issues on a Mac  What I did    1  on the emulator  settings-display -  disable screen orientation 2  on Eclipse  emulator startup options -  -cpu-delay 100   Those had some effect in lowering CPU use  not it is around 40-60    not ultimate solution   But again  the CPU use is NOT  100  anymore

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As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools  the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency  The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at     http   developer android com guide developing devices emulator html acceleration    For enabling GPU aceleration  run the emulator from the command line or add  -gpu on  to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration   emulator -avd  lt avd name gt  -gpu on   For using the CPU machine extensions  you have to install the driver  caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers   Once it s installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD

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Now instead of using emulator we can test Android apps using ARC Welder app on Chrome  App Runtime for Chrome

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Add some more RAM and use SSD drive  Android Studio is best run on 8 to 12 GB of RAM using SSD drives based on my experience

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Try scaling down the emulator  it makes it a bit faster  even if it doesn t it really feels faster

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I noticed that the my emulator  Eclipse plugin  was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings  Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive  It is still slow  but better than it used to be

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Android SDK rev  17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies    This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot   See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details  Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration  Don t forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system    Configuring VM Acceleration on Windows Configuring VM Acceleration on Mac Configuring VM Acceleration on Linux   After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image  as described in the documentation  you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image   For example    Target  Intel Atom x86 System Image - API Level 10 CPU ABI  Intel Atom  x86

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Yes  you are right since native android emulator is very slow than the other custom emulators like genymotion  I figured out that while I was running functional calabash android test       On the native android emulator  this issue is produced when  timeout exception  occurs  so I moved to genymotion emulator who resolved the problem    P S  genymotion emulator is not free anymore

[android] Why is the Android emulator so slow? How can we speed up the Android emulator?

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