Honeycomb Android emulator is dog slow - will it get manageable before the official release?

android performance sdk android-3.0-honeycomb
Artem Russakovskii picture Artem Russakovskii · Jan 27, 2011 · Viewed 10.3k times · Source

I thought the Gingerbread emulator was slow, but man - the Honeycomb emulator is so slow on a modern PC, it's practically unusable. Since Reto Meier asked to throw up our Honeycomb questions onto StackOverflow, here is mine - will it get faster any time soon? How are we expected to develop apps for tablets when I want to pull my hair out instead?

The SDK tools site now mentions "Known issues with emulator performance: Because the Android emulator must simulate the ARM instruction set architecture on your computer, emulator performance is slow. We're working hard to resolve the performance issues and it will improve in future releases" but I'm wondering just how soon these future releases with the fixes will be coming out.

Answer

Reto Meier picture Reto Meier · Jan 27, 2011

The short answer is "yes". The Honeycomb emulator performance will be improved in future release of the development tools.

For right now, you should start by increasing the amount of device RAM used by the emulator. The default is 256Mb but 1Gb is probably more reasonable.

[Update (April 9 2012) -- The latest developer tools release (r18), combined with a new system image (4.0.3 r2) dramatically improves performance of the emulator by supporting GPU and CPU acceleration. More details here.]

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