[android-studio] Android Studio is slow (how to speed up)?

I recently upgraded from Eclipse to Android Studio and I'm not really liking the experience. I'm comparing them both on a Windows 7 64 bit ultimate with 16GB of ram and Intel i7 4770 running NVidia Geforce 780 with the latest NVidia drivers if it matters and I'm running the latest JDK and the latest Android Studio.

The Android Studio is very slow in building the project which I can live with but it's also extremely resource intensive and sometimes slows down the PC to a crawl.

Whenever I'm building or running anything in AS, my PC seems to become extremely sluggish. It also causes flickering of screen and occasionally blanking my second monitor if I click on "Gradle build running" spinner which I find very odd. The RAM usage also shoots up to ~3GB which I find excessive for doing nothing (this is when it's idle after a few builds).

In addition, the panels at the bottom of AS keep jumping around which is a horrible user experience (moves from Android to Messages to Version Control or anything else on an ad-hoc basis depending on what's happening which is very, very annoying).

What I would like to know is basically:

1) How do I make Android Studio run better? I may be doing something wrong or missing some updates that I'm not aware of and I'm sure others have also noticed these behaviors and have found some solutions to it.

2) How do I "pin" the bottom panels so that they don't jump around and instead, let me, the user, navigate to them when I wish to instead of automatically switching them?

Many thanks and my apologies again if it's not the correct place for these questions.

Edit 1 Some more comments:

  • I'm using the latest stable build as of today. The build is Android Studio 1.2.2 Build # AI-141.1980579, Build on June 3, 2015
  • The behavior happens when using either Java 7 or 8. It doesn't appear to be related to the version of Java.
  • I am not using Presentation Mode. Just the vanilla view.
  • Doing the changes to the build configuration (thanks to @Blackbelt and his answer) appears to have helped with the build but the other problems with sluggishness and general user experience remain.

This question is related to android-studio

The answer is


Starting from Android Studio 3.5 some of the settings can be configured via:

Preferences > Appearance & Behavior > System Settings > Memory Settings

Preferences


It's not compiling that's hurting me here, it's the typing. I could disable all the smart features and be back to notepad++ like TomTsagk suggested in a comment. For today I need more cores and RAM.

Playing devil's advocate I'd argue that typing shouldn't require a 16Gb PC octacore PC. Liked Sajan Rana's advice but things are so slow here it felt mostly a placebo.

To be fair I am using 1.4RC1, which is just short of being in the stable branch. Turning the internet off helped a little. The new feature of simultaneous Design (Preview) and Text views working with XML layouts is very helpful.

No, it is ridiculous. Never leave the stable channel.


Well, one thing that worked for me is using physical android device instead of emulator. As in my PC( i5 and 4GB RAM ) the android studio takes about 700MB of memory and the emulator takes another 700. Thus the whole performance of the computer goes down. Working with a physical device saves the strain from the emulator.


Even i do have core i5 machine and 4GB RAM, i do face the same issue. On clean and rebuild the project gradle build system downloads the files jar/lib fresh files from internet. You need to disable this option available in settings of your Android studio. This will re-use the cached lib/jar files. Also the speed of Android studio depends on speed of your hard disk also. Here is detailed blog-post on how to improve too slow Android studio.


I've quickly resolved this issue by upgrading gradle (Android Studio seems to use old version).

1) Download latest version (https://gradle.org/gradle-download/) and unpack somewhere.
2) Update path in Android Studio: File > Settings > Build, Ex../Gradle


I just want to share my case:

  1. if you need play-store library, don't compile all of it, just compile library that you need. example: if you only need maps library instead of compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:9.0.2' do this compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:9.0.2' on your gradle
  2. Dont use OpenJDK for the java, I use java 7 oracle and it works well. if yout need to change default java do this on linux terminal sudo update-alternatives --config java and pick the number

I'm using ubuntu 32bit 4GB RAM. that's all the issue I ever encounter with AS.


My Android Studio was not only slow in general use, but also when building.

Here's what I did:

  1. Uninstalled Android Studio (Don't delete, uninstall it and check delete the SDK too). Then delete Android folders located in C:\Users\\ folder namely: .android, AndroidStudioX.X
  2. Uninstall the SDKs via the SDK manager, remove everything ( If there is lef SDK folder, delete them )
  3. Download and Reinstall the latest build for Android Studio (v2.1.2 as of this writing); Install only the SDK/Emulators you need;

It's fast now.


My Story before that:

My laptop sports an Intel Core i7-3612QM and 8gig of ram. When I builded, all the 4 cores/8 threads were on 100% usage. My entire system froze until the ~10 minute wass done. Gradle took me like ~10 unproductive minutes of slow down. This is very annoying. I am using Android Studio since 1.4. There were also tremendous slow down when I copy paste code to and from, selecting menus, right-click context menus, editing manifest, editing gradle files, opening layout files, rendering in the UI Editor, etc. Its was very unusable most of the time.

Due to frustration, I did the above steps. Its fast now. Very usable just as before. I build for only ~20 seconds compare to ~10minutes before that. Also, Android Studio eats about 6gig with emulator and browser with lots of tab open, unlike before its hovering on 98% RAM usage. Not just that, I even saved 45 gigs of space for whatever reason. I only use couple of SDKs and Emulators when I checked the Android SDK folder, it occupies 45gig of space! I think the IDE is having a hard time accessing/IO on my SDK folder.

If you've tried other given solutions and still experiencing the same issue, it may be time to remove Android IDE/SDKs altogether and start anew (it might take you sometime to setup that newly, but its worth it. Considering I've been suffering this sluggishness for months and cost me my productivity).

I really guess that this might be caused by cumulative patches that has been done since then. Or the 45 gig SDK folder on my poorly defragmented drive. I don't know and I could be wrong.

Thank you! HTH


This worked for me!
Open build.gradle (it's inside your project) and change the both jcenter to mavenCentral

(you can do it in Global file too: C:\Program Files\AndroidStudio\plugins\android\lib\templates\gradle-projects\NewAndroidProject\root\build.gradle.ftl however, you will need to do this modification again after AndroidStudio upgrade)


Click Help > Edit Custom properties and add this line:

sun.java2d.noddraw=false

... worked successfully for me to fix the speed issues (Windows 10 64-bit). It's absolute voodoo as far as I'm concerned (I haven't done any research on why that should work), and there is a warning above that property that it can cause blinking and fail to repaint on some graphics cards, but there you go. (Inspired by LairdPleng's comment, further information)


This might sound stupid and off topic but in my case I was using an external 4k Monitor with my MacBook Pro 13' (MacOS High Sierra, 2016) and I had the resolution set to the wrong scaled resolution. Switching to another scaled resolution where there was no "using a scaled resolution may affect performance" warning resolved my overall performance issues. In my case I had to increase the resolution to max.

So for me it was an overall performance problem which first surfaced with Android Studio, it was not an Android Studio specific problem.

EDIT 25.11.2017

As a result I had to increase font sizes in Android Studio:

enter image description here

enter image description here

and on my Mac in General. I followed some of these tips to get that done.


As you are learning, performance problems with AS are not trivial to diagnose! In my case, an array of 9215-character-long strings (see below) was causing AS to dump threads every time I typed a few characters. The thread dump in turn caused AS to freeze for many seconds at a time. This bug appeared in the Windows 64 bit release of AS 2.2, still occurs in 2.2.1, but was not present in 2.1.

Finding out that long strings were causing my lockups involved a lot of trial and error. But, I learned a lot in the process, to wit:

  • idea.log contains excellent diagnostics (Help->Show Log in Explorer);
  • If you see extreme, but intermittent slowdowns, suspect AS is dumping threads. This will be reported in idea.log. If threads are being dumped, the dumps will tell what code AS was executing when the problem occurred;
  • Find out whether the problem occurs in other projects. If not:
    • Look for unusual content in the project file you are editing when it happens (atypical indentation, long lines, overall size, special characters, etc.);
    • Try exporting settings from another project (File->Export Settings) and importing them to the problem project (File->Import Settings);
  • If so:
    • If threads were dumped, consult these and text in idea.log near in time to the dump notices for details;
    • Consult idea.log for messages about memory consumption and see other answers to this question such as https://stackoverflow.com/a/30818099/5025060 for advice regarding memory and other tunables.

BTW, for the present I have worked around the problem I describe above by moving my long strings into a separate file (a new class containing only the array itself). I try not to edit this file with AS:

package com.code_read.numerous;

// Stored in this separate file as workaround for but in Android Studio 2.2 and 2.2.1:
public class numstrings {

    // Array of long random numbers, pregenerated to save CPU:
    public static String[] numStrings = {

        "1994801747005006843714201906880253696522949748985326677038709789185967438890341338611514272350885327622521908597157249370879944242140791335147432026134824720740049422401084226720133085129616983462326179050524905784581311738181639680883063657881249352299873899633102883079263518571839777601914176182096937173423830949774911901873302923856537838861459241472638781656098601555557408806160767422350665857755259469740684280328594623487891856649804661311584819889021607692403556050362471700089064611736323716743369045566550043297886962382238972346803574929493941865243842713784425065710461253862400171476763748485152265818223228738602947583646715233019327072692198843646688882967198106819142520249672265351399800388354025004692933034453856310668983827639931666936938916009440796386813973983672644014904413778331910858768917928873281368985209021482683952081386327659051891824451191925471319812621259979532306720944409709629735970343666731869954034316405565091456617722086997643045624243562108799691470340913893507767740993074136786407728485289296107929206890085077392507082912846952398146667121278744316903425134851243985929053983393147017505604434867248844096413015812503568125982543971955820413742070505248547214107175178265142568846059329034952916141529583930414467212444502036542524617924549772053409654734421683144469210875898562685596220560192157362075125532254942822533743408921908929641678544642703503594074980743406344521590503045906227137661428271960131113277418339143973111082350228713746798378222516362568169460000318016326976650293881476430655341696576379350118649066871443832472485758673939055476560230899083569553163276996789822628817697832818790241925450785958610992913835742648625121141300671379995864219490095867782136575514562312355082557943388653539768674297724271799184606163161313425019700484444819066035391880746315112526037089535247330068932135889561140507915603287185585871635986744215882173808096949176219939887238887334722353676565435219071025041608367345267066726720611291582289439439612089674948098814236544937685399901819502531986223218568943243997435066143130178791000919086345646088512272404095142569642614311667312552162499433826639585939112523653901049019510191636415536463869158678443168682968868561220976836056328690236345809499227235279493834218592602537877502486405864881552717053543189719307053056816394385005456307948699769878097421584471193206705541786346321099838491406911644862584829227001243533889390554091269606738674355046945345379729891849274972515399708243414881495449271744164313389780954995533638662175281443803394130967885827452291651790131097465299047904416340363246566292581832443962169777366091769276178419242913042363067255854810045262072561262497882054411067404793283085662036333037852105588278019261992793348698449219702477068967045885370794330720954454245355308540958222825316492004461258554509240961981517193582846294254836203336025137341304408025995714446392364687275863279014867118285477989325893247306751836367684953368894347431163738410742861211279475477541038825000059684941207285338893011165006513877204119377603716863643207293943901695444037969482551395887698689973125887804501587905607600937731808334970542039068964636903217786176395609646375619848654481970892367791860451203264612717833201133436864904072748056378537459970985749678435355552142278067182133232365792401224495951897760268571948611922604355922375837544987778238789194623584535535254680741527344169337882616511606089113581933652057746108337126592702595374689971756756111067694717736394911229561144105722719640374962520460026331390332290940671029266628430146882434958107641078763479395158409336392937553836429741828629803422700786051415863869569938234773023177898087231140282878699043621587286853385344543538863846680176575820030898369777652851615637670515908885347304910473243565872464918739636453311477591108155484066595590866237425656891311608168730789287191508068168280943391188623809857749891974336067657666981798722169247806143519254933881034442491694639196165306619163668670589218273202395456712339218153069379599709284877699907448943232601989425999495118291205271538894703052937474218759295979078630049366622491626168635389072593839896835573511248649620277111886034197292219150370416314231865599090073037180634352088129486602845851146031025385976117573877636799889628310244685157927781259284499624581204368313487038197704984151463672324235759633466623345866962841874409357386712655972436268785904826885404662832395057952852032223129527277689869930541833537646239889750795361522746356839955237437406742371092053189844778455591438073185335922355656078594182187644269204458708004487782896518372050828673610973903722768428111606169275709807883199484042341569039148939656571042895897900511235866082925245585957414155456211557703308834984738389589467066787565024602550298595008588579506402296897017756315583049561492731227012775126346716028440596381695862547286594079673622699591054192184165670931182439575423162742954983282488173948326304669845817443923349833883463090802279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        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        ... (13 lines total) ...
}

An anti-virus is causing the slow-down

In one particular system I looked at, this issue was caused by an over-zealous anti-virus that was interfering with Gradle, the build manager for Android Studio. It seems every time Gradle was "touching" a .jar file, the virus checker was unzipping the .jar and scanning it for viruses first. The Gradle build could only continue once the unzipping and scan was complete, thus leading to very long build times (5 min plus). Since Android Studio, by default, runs a Gradle build when you start up, it manifests as an extremely slow start-up.

The problem is extremely easy to check for:

  1. While you are experiencing the symptoms of a slow Android Studio, press Ctrl- Alt-Delete and open Windows Task Manager.
  2. Click on the Processes tab to see the active processes and sort by CPU. If you see an anti-virus taking significant amounts of CPU percentage intermittently while Android Studio appears to be loading, it is likely to be the same issue.
  3. You can verify further by looking at the scan logs of the anti-virus to see if it is indeed, examining the .jar files.

To solve this, you will have to add the correct directories to the "excluded folders" of your anti-virus. Assume that your Windows username is "Username" and you have installed Android Studio on C: drive. You would then request to exclude from the virus check the following directories:

C:\Users\Username\.android
C:\Users\Username\.AndroidStudio2.2
C:\Users\Username\.gradle
C:\Users\Username\.m2
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Android\Sdk

Please note that you may need to take additional security precautions if you exclude these directories and you should co-operate with your security department in the workplace. This may involve setting up your own Maven repository if deemed necessary.

(I am aware that this is a late answer, but none of the previous answers have addressed this potential issue)


I followed this post and it worked great for me.

EDIT:

Following tips have been mentioned in the above post.

In gradle.properties, put this:

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.configureondemand=true

And in build.gradle, put this (Note this will disable lint check):

tasks.whenTaskAdded { task ->
    if (task.name.equals("lint")) {
        task.enabled = false
    }
}

I detected another reason - Thumbs.db, which affected performance badly.

Go to File > Settings > Editor > File Types and in field Ignore files and folders add this: Thumbs.db;

Now, Android Studio runs like a charm.


DO NOT EDIT studio.vmoptions ,It may not work.

In gradle.properties file (in app directory) add this :

org.gradle.parallel=true
org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx7g -XX:MaxPermSize=1024m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

to sum it up

1) in AndroidStudio's settings > compile enable checkbox named Compile independent modules in parallel.

2) Under Help> Edit Custom VM Options I have:

-Xms1024m 
-Xmx4096m # <------ increase this to most of your RAM 
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m 
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=440m 
-XX:+UseCompressedOops 
-XX:-HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError 
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

P.S. - Some people say Note, instead of VM options, it's better to combine can be overriden by combining those lines into one line single command in gradle.properties, like this :

org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xms1024m -Xmx4096m ......

3) I have an old dual core with 4GB ram, running ubuntu. Qs command line option I have only --offline (which specifies that the build should operate without accessing network resources). I also enabled the remaining checkboxes and now it's running ok:

  • Make project automatically

  • Use in-process building Configure on demand

  • Check the AndroidStudio's settings, under compile that the checkbox Compile independent modules in parallel is enabled.

Under Vmoptions I have

-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=1024

I have an old dual core with 4GB ram, running ubuntu. Qs commandline option I have only --offline , which specifies that the build should operate without accessing network resources. I enabled also the remaining checkboxes:

  1. Make project automatically
  2. Use in-process building
  3. Configure on demand

    and it is running ok

Edit

It is possible to provide additional options through studio.vmoptions located at (just replace X.X with version):

  • Windows: go to %USERPROFILE%\.AndroidStudioX.X\studio.exe.vmoptions (or studio64.exe.vmoptions)

  • Mac: ~/Library/Preferences/.AndroidStudioX.X/studio.vmoptions

  • Linux: ~/.AndroidStudioX.X/studio.vmoptions (and/or studio64.vmoptions)

Increasing the value of -Xmx should help a lot. E.g

-Xms1024m
-Xmx4096m
-XX:MaxPermSize=1024m
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=256m
-XX:+UseCompressedOops

will assign 4G as max heap, with initial value of 1G

Edit:

On windows the defaults are stored into C:\Program Files\Android\Android Studio\bin\*.vmoptions. The IDE allows you to tweak those values through Help->Edit Custom VM options (thanks to @Code-Read for pointing it out).

EDIT 2:

Android studio 3.5 makes easier to change same of those values. Just go to:

Preferences > Appearance & Behavior > System Settings > Memory Settings

I noticed that AS transfers too much data from/to HDD. It is very annoying, especially when starting to write a new line of code. So, I think, better will be reinstalling a hard disk with SSD. I have i5 with 6 Gb of memory, and the CPU seldom loads more than 50% even at build time. So, the most weak place is HDD.


Adding more memory helped me:

  1. Click "Help"
  2. Edit Custom VM Options

Android Studio 2.1.2 Edit Custom VM Options:

  1. Change values

like below:

-Xms512m    
-Xmx2560m   
-XX:MaxPermSize=700m    
-XX:ReservedCodeCacheSize=480m    
-XX:+UseCompressedOops
  1. Restart Android Studio

The best way to boost up android studio runtime performance is to use SSD Drive. It will boost the performance as very much. I did all the above things and felt I should go for new laptop, but suddenly I came to know about SSD Drive and I tried it. Its Much Much better.....


Tips to make android studio fast:

Enable Offline Work:

  1. Click File -> Settings. Search for "gradle" and click in Offline work box.
  2. Go to Compiler (in same settings dialog just below Gradle) and add --offline to Command-line Options text box.

Improve Gradle Performance

gradle can be optimized too. The easy way is to modify the settings in global gradle.properties (create it if not exists in the following folders: Windows - C:\users\your_name\.gradle\; Linux- /home/<username>/.gradle/; Mac- /Users/<username>/.gradle/; ) and in that file, add these two lines:

org.gradle.daemon=true
org.gradle.parallel=true

For More: http://www.viralandroid.com/2015/08/how-to-make-android-studio-fast.html


I have tried to measure speed of Android Studio 3.1.4 on the same hardware: Macbook Pro 2011, RAM 4Gb, SSD 240GB Samsung, Core i5 2.4Ghz. I have installed on this machine 3 different OS: Windows 10, MacOS Hight Sierra 10.13, Ubuntu 18.04. Avarage build time (running command: gradlew clean build, gradlew clean assembleRelease) on MacOS/Ubuntu was around 30% faster than on Windows.

On my another working machine: Core i5 3.0 Ghz 7400, RAM 16Gb, SSD 250Gb. Build time takes 4.34min on Windows 10 machine. The same project on a little bit slower processor, but with the same RAM and SSD and it is running Ubuntu 16.04 build time takes two times faster!! Well I was shocked with results, but still I choose Windows as development machine, because it's much more comfortable for me to use comfortable and usable keyboard and sotfware than on Unix like systems. And even if I had to choose between MacOS and Ubuntu - mac is really much easier to setup everything, and Ubuntu is too complex to use for usual people. Choise is up to you.


Recommendations:

  • MUST TO SAY: if you have any chance, spend some money for better PC(cpu), it's Most important ..

Tweaks:

  • Some people say, that OS (Operating System) might cause much slowness. For example, XP or LINUX (or etc) was mentioned to perform 70% faster (don't know why..).
  • Disable VCS by File > Settings > Plugins and disable the following things : CVS Integration; Git Integration; GitHub; Google Cloud ... things; Subversion Integration; hg4idea;

  • Editor is a resource eating too (especially on Large Monitors) and slow. Make it much much faster: click Help > Edit custom VM options and add these lines :
    -Dsun.java2d.d3d=false
    -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
    save it and Restart Android Studio.

  • If Android Studio has a proxy server setting and can't reach the server then it takes a long time to build and waiting for a timeout. Removing it helps much. File > Settings > Appearance & Behavior > System settings > HTTP Proxy.
  • Another Useful quote (from article):

    Modules are expensive… On my current project I had to build some libraries from scratch and had to fork some that almost fitted my needs but not quite! If that modules are not constantly modified, it’s important to have this into consideration: the time needed to compile them from scratch, or even to check if the previous individual module build is up-to-date, can be up to almost 4x greater than to simply load that dependency as a binary .jar/.aar.

    Hint: run the gradle build -profile for an HTML report showing where the time goes regarding the build process.

    Note: keep that “unnecessary” modules in your version control system for the eventuallity of a quickfix/improvement in that dependency.

  • In your Gradle build script, use only
    specific Google Service, like: compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services-maps:...'
    Instead of full Google Library: compile 'com.google.android.gms:play-services:...'
    (Compile time goes from 2 minutes to around 25 seconds).

  • Gradle configures every project before executing tasks, regardless of whether the project is actually needed for the particular build. In global gradle.properties adding this will help much: org.gradle.configureondemand=true

  • Surprisingly, some people say , they solved problem by reducing: 1) heapsizes to -Xmx256m (instead of higher values); 2) Emulator Ram-size (from Edit AVD > Advanced Settings);

Everyday Recommendations:

  • Don't run multiple projects simultaneously.
  • Don't close emulator after using once (use same emulator for running app each time; If you test large apps, better to use a real mobile phone instead of emulator).
  • clean your project every time after running your app in emulator - click Build > Clean Project (or Rebuild), you can use keyboard shortcut.

try deleting c:\users\.AndroidStudioX.X folder. it will also remove your android studio settings and customization


This answer pertains to slow Gradle build speeds for Windows 10 after you've already gotten the Xmx and Xms memory settings straightened out.

Windows Defender

As far as Windows Defender is concerned it's simply not enough to add folders / files to the Windows Defender exclusion list via "Files" or "Folders".

You must add directories pertaining to Android Studio / Gradle / Java (embedded JDK or Oracle JDK) as "Process" exclusions to Windows Defender :

  • Go through the answer by David Rawson
  • During a Gradle build... monitor the Windows Task Manager's Processes
  • To Windows Defender, add "Process" exclusions for directories containing the file/executable you see utilizing the CPU during a build associated with Android Studio / Gradle

This obviously comes with security implications.

The following describes more details pertaining to using a "Process" exclusion in Windows Defender (as opposed to adding a simple "File" or "Folder" exclusion) :

A file name with full path causes the particular binary file to be excluded, i.e. any files it touches, regardless of where the file is located, will not be scanned by Windows Defender. A file name without any path causes any binary file with this file name to be excluded regardless of its location. A path followed by a "*" (e.g. c:\my\private\tools*) causes any binaries under this path to be excluded. Any files touched by these processes will be excluded. This is different from a path exclusion, where files touched by any process under the excluded path is excluded.

The key here being....adding these exclusions as "Process" type exclusions takes into account "files the binary touches" as opposed to manually finding and excluding every file / folder that is generated by Android Studio / Gradle.

Windows File Indexing

Windows file indexing seems to also slow down Gradle builds. Turn off Windows File Indexing for the directories used by Gradle / Android Studio.

Here are my "Windows File Indexing" and "Windows Defender Process" exclusions :

 C:\Program Files\Android\*
 C:\Users\<yourUserAcct>\.android\*
 C:\Users\<yourUserAcct>\.AndroidStudio3.0\*
 C:\Users\<yourUserAcct>\.gradle\*
 C:<pathToYourAndroidStudioProjectFolder>

Apart from following the optimizations mentioned in existing answers (not much helpful, was still painfully slow), doing below did the trick for me.

HP Notebook with 6 GM RAM and i5 processor I have, still android studio was terribly slow. After checking task manager for memory usage, noticed that there is a software called "HP Touchpoint Analytics Client" that was taking more than 1 GB memory. Found that it's a spyware installed by HP in Windows 10 after searching about it in Google.

Uninstalled a bunch of HP software which does nothing and slows down the system. Now, Android studio is considerably fast - Gradle build completes in less than 30 seconds when compared to more than 2 minutes before. Every keystroke would take 5 seconds to respond, now it is real time and performance is comparable with Eclipse.

This might be true for Laptops from other vendors as well like Dell, etc. HP really messed up the user experience with their spyware for Windows 10 users. Uninstall them, it will help Android studio and improves the overall laptop experience as well.

Hope this helps someone. Thanks.


In case setting -Xmx4096m -XX:MaxHeapSize=256m (and etc.. mentioned in above answers) doest work, then do this manually:

Step 1 : Start Android studio and close any open project (File > Close Project).

Step 2 : On Welcome window, Go to Configure > Settings.

Step 3 : Go to Build, Execution, Deployment > Compiler

Step 4 : Change Build process heap size (Mbytes) to 1024 and Additional build process to VM Options to -Xmx512m.

Step 5 : Close or Restart Android Studio.

SOLVED - Andriod Studio 1.3 Gradle Could not reserve enough space for object heap Issue


If your app code base is large and you have multiple modules then you can try Local AAR approach as described here, it will give you a big boost in Android Studio performance.

https://blog.gojekengineering.com/how-we-improved-performance-and-build-times-in-android-studio-306028166b79

Sample project can be found here:

https://github.com/akhgupta/AndroidLocalMavenRepoAARDemo


Just for anyone looking, after upgrading to El Capitan, I noticed a huge lag with the IDE. After increasing a ton of RAM and using the suggestions above, it turned out that I needed to update the legacy Java, and reinstall via: https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572?locale=en_US

After installing this, all lag was gone.


Okay. I will agree that every answer written above will somehow help the cause. I am one of those who is on the same boat. With nothing working my way, and Android Studio refusing to build on the Offline mode due to the associated dependencies, I did something that eased my problem within minutes.

Every time I build the gradle, I turn off my internet. ( Notice that the Offline mode is not checked). I don't know how and why but this works.


There are many ways to speed up Android Studio.

  • Speed up gradle build time.

    1.Go to Project gradle.properties file and remove comment from both line.

    2.copy gradle.properties file to your .gradle folder so that you don't need to setup for every project.

  • Enable Work Offline so that Android studio/Gradle don't need to check for newer file over internet every time.

Go to Project gradle.properties file and remove comment from both line


Please add in setting.gradle (root folder)

startParameter.offline=true

  • I should mention that if you are using Mac, downloading and running an app from the App Store (like "iBoostUp" etc.) which will clean out unused system files can speed up your computer dramatically, including AS.

  • I also found that adding more memory to my Mac sped up AS as well.