Speed up android emulator startup in eclipse

When exploring hello world android development app in eclipse, the emulator just painfully slow to even launch. To me, the speed matter because if it is slow, the test and development cycle will be affected and thus, the development experience will not be pleasant. So today, before we go into hello world article, we will first explore if it is possible to improve the speed of android emulator startup in eclipse.

I have google and found a few links, there are as of following.

• https://software.intel.com/en-us/android/articles/speeding-up-the-android-emulator-on-intel-architecture


• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1554099/why-is-the-android-emulator-so-slow


• http://www.developer.com/ws/android/development-tools/supercharge-your-android-emulator-speed-with-intel-emulation-technologies.html


• http://askubuntu.com/questions/283972/how-to-speed-up-the-android-emulator-in-ubuntu-12-10


• http://techtach.com/2014/05/boost-android-emulator-performanceon-linux-speeding-up-android-emulator-on-ubuntu/


• http://delphi.org/2013/11/8-tips-to-speed-up-your-android-arm-emulator-avd/


• https://www.virag.si/2012/10/speeding-up-android-emulator/


• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2160567


• https://www.infinum.co/the-capsized-eight/articles/is-your-android-emulator-just-too-slow


• http://blogs.nuxeo.com/development/2011/10/speeding-up-the-android-emulator/

To summarize the solution used to the links above, there are Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager (HAXM), linux kvm or virtualbox, android virtual device (AVD) snapshot, increase device ram, GPU acceleration, disable antivirus ?!, 3rd party android emulator, using actual android device instead of emulator, etc.

Because every developer has different development environment and every sdk and improvement over time may render these method describe later in this article invalid. Thus, the speed gain in your environment when android emulator start may vary and thus create unnecessary confusion. Thus, you should always read on the links and find a solution that work best in your environment. The following steps improved my environment in such a way.

1. Before it start need 10minutes and then even after waited 10minutes, then it crashed. With this, on my i3 intel cpu, with 8GB of ram, the speed increase in within less than 2minutes and response is emulator is manageable.


2. The emulator start over time is persistence. There are situation when once the android virtual device is created, the second time it boot, the android screen in the emulator get gibberish and unclickable. So with my method describe later, this will not be a problem.

Before we go into the solution, let's understand what emulator is. Emulator according to wikipedia

In computing, an emulator is hardware or software or both that duplicates (or emulates) the functions of one computer system (the guest) in another computer system (the host), different from the first one, so that the emulated behavior closely resembles the behavior of the real system (the guest).

In android sense, this emulator actually emulate a smartphone environment including hardware instruction, from workstation cpu x86 to the android device which uses arm. Because of Android Emulator emulates a real ARM processor on top of an x86 processor, this create a lot of overhead. Connection of real device through usb via eclipse integration is not available for linux environment. Thus, for initial learning phase, a android emulator is a good start.



Launch Android Virtual Device Manager from eclipse.



create a new android virtual device, as seem below with this setting.



As you can see, the target for the application is being currently latest at Android 5.0 - API Level 21. The important part now is to choose CPU/ABI to Intel Atom(x86_64). Of cause smartphone device mostly with arm cpu but as mentioned previously, we want emulator be a quick test environment.

If you notice, I have left Use Host GPU uncheck. When this is check with my environment, there is no speed up and when the android evironment started, the colour became gibberish and not clickable. Now start the device and experience the clicking in the environment.

Happy develop in android.