{"id":674,"date":"2011-07-10T23:30:10","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T06:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/?p=674"},"modified":"2011-10-20T21:18:50","modified_gmt":"2011-10-21T04:18:50","slug":"android-emulator-performance-tuning-tips","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/android-emulator-performance-tuning-tips\/","title":{"rendered":"How-To: Android emulator performance tuning tips"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image\" style=\"display:none !important;\">\n<\/div><!-- .wpsso-pinterest-pin-it-image -->\n\n<p>As some of you may already noticed, running Android Honeycomb application on the Android emulator, isn&#8217;t the most fun thing to do, because it&#8217;s painfully slow. Besides the start-up time (can be avoided, which I explain later), just using it is a pain. Google is planning to improve the performance, but if you can&#8217;t wait that long I\u2019ve put together a few tips which may help improve your experience.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\n&#8211; <em><strong>Emulated memory size<\/strong><\/em>.<br \/>\nBy default the Honeycomb <em>AVD<\/em> is created to emulate 256MB of RAM, my advice is to increase this significant, I\u2019m using 1GB (1024MB).<br \/>\nIf you\u2019re creating the <em>AVD<\/em> for Honeycomb in Eclipse you\u2019ll find the RAM setting in the Hardware section under \u201c<em>Device ram size<\/em>\u201d. If you already have an <em>AVD<\/em> you can increase the setting by finding the directory you\u2019re <em>AVD<\/em> is in (e.g. .android\/avd\/honeycomb.avd), editing the <em>emulator-user.ini<\/em> file, and changing <em>hw.ramSize<\/em> to whatever you want the ram size to be in MB.<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; <em><strong>Enable Snapshots<\/strong><\/em>.<br \/>\nEnabling snapshots on an <em>AVD<\/em> allows the emulator to start-up an <em>AVD<\/em> in the state it was in when you closed it. This means that it doesn\u2019t have to go through the boot-up procedure each time, which will save you a reasonable chunk of time.<br \/>\nFirst on the initial launch make sure you select \u201c<em>Save to snapshot<\/em>\u201d. Get the emulator up and running and put it into the state you want. I like to have it start at the desktop (home screen) view. Now close the emulator. I found that it wasn\u2019t very responsive when closing, so wait a bit, watch the mouse icon go to \u201cbusy\u201d and let it write everything to disk.<br \/>\nNow, launch the emulator again and this time uncheck \u201c<em>Save to snapshot<\/em>\u201d but make sure Launch from snapshot is chosen. Voila! The emulator launches quickly. And when you save it it shuts down quickly because it\u2019s not saving anymore.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_1.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-676 alignnone\" title=\"snapshot_1\" src=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_1-212x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_1-212x300.png 212w, http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_1.png 259w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 212px) 100vw, 212px\" \/><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_2.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-677 alignright\" title=\"snapshot_2\" src=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_2-212x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"212\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_2-212x300.png 212w, http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_2-213x300.png 213w, http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/07\/snapshot_2.png 259w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 212px) 100vw, 212px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As some of you may already noticed, running Android Honeycomb application on the Android emulator, isn&#8217;t the most fun thing to do, because it&#8217;s painfully slow. Besides the start-up time (can be avoided, which I explain later), just using it is a pain. Google is planning to improve the performance, but if you can&#8217;t wait that long I\u2019ve put together a few tips which may help improve your experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,95],"tags":[154,67,56,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/wiebe-elsinga.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}