How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#1

Post by DanielH » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 3:39 PM UTC

How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%
blogs.nuxeo.com

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#2

Post by shoota » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:19 PM UTC

It's not really an emulator if you're running the x86 port of Android virtualized on x86 hardware...

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#3

Post by jamesu » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:34 PM UTC

Makes me wonder why the SDK doesn't use an x86 vm by default in the first place.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#4

Post by imperialWicket » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:38 PM UTC

What system takes 55 seconds to boot an Android Virtual Device?

I get to the home screen with everything loaded in about 18 seconds. I'm on a fairly new system with decent processor and memory to spare, but even on my old single processor 4GB laptop I get the emulator launched in about 35 seconds.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#5

Post by ketralnis » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:39 PM UTC

shoota wrote: post #2

It's not really an emulator if you're running the x86 port of Android virtualized on x86 hardware...

Sure, but to most developers the functionality of seeing their mobile application running on their desktop machine is "emulation". And they probably don't need true emulation, they just need to test their application

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#6

Post by codenerdz » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:40 PM UTC

based on the data in the article QEmu + Android ARM runs at approximately same speed as Nexus One phone which is a good thing, right? I dont want my development emulator to run twice as fast as actual hardware, do I.

The question is whether you can make the emulator run as fast as modern dual core android phones.

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#7

Post by sp332 » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

jamesu wrote: post #3

Makes me wonder why the SDK doesn't use an x86 vm by default in the first place.

Wouldn't all the NDK programs at least have to be recompiled?

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#8

Post by shareme » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:42 PM UTC

hmm why not set the avd ram size to 512?..even on my slow 32bit 4 gig ram 2-cpu core desktop ubuntu I do not get his slow figures..

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#9

Post by simmons » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:50 PM UTC

I've been using Android-x86 in a VirtualBox for development for a long time, and totally recommend it if your app is pure Dalvik (i.e. no native ARM code). It's a night and day difference after using the emulator.

One pain point I have, though, is the need to always hit the VirtualBox host key when switching between Eclipse and VirtualBox, since there's no true integration. Sometimes I also get some weird effects with the mouse pointer not being able to move around the entire framebuffer. (Hmm, maybe a VirtualBox integration module for android-x86 would be a good weekend project...)

Re: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%

#10

Post by calloc » Tue, Oct 11, 2011, 4:57 PM UTC

imperialWicket wrote: post #4

What system takes 55 seconds to boot an Android Virtual Device? I get to the home screen with everything loaded in about 18 seconds. I'm on a fairly new system with decent processor and memory to spare, but even on my old single processor 4GB laptop I get the emulator launched in about 35 seconds.

An core i5 with 8 GB of ram and a 7200 RPM 500 GB hard drive.

Actually, it is closer to 70 seconds.

Then the lag while attempting to use it is unbearable, it stutters, input is completely ignored, or it crashes randomly when we try to replicate that bug on an actual device we can't.