Android Emulator Alarm Clock Crashes

Question

I am using the Android Emulator to debug my application, first off it is ridiculously slow, I mean like 15mins to load slow and on top of it, my Alarm Clock application fails?

Am I the only one, or do other people experience this? Is there a fix or will I just have to go cook steaks while the emulator is booting?

EDIT: I am running it on a Vista laptop, which as fixxed describe does not work well with the alarm clock failing, but I don't think it could be my laptop, its 2GB RAM Intel Dual CPU T2390 1.87GHz, its not even a year old. Could it be that I am creating new AVD's each time I run the emulator?

Anthony

Answer 1

The very first time you launch the emulator on a new AVD, it will take a lot longer to start up, because it is creating copies of disk images and customizing them for the hardware parameters you specified.

Beyond that, you may need a faster PC. Android supplies an emulator -- you are running actual ARM opcodes in a virtualized phone. Converting and interpreting opcodes on the fly takes a fair bit of horsepower in terms of CPU and RAM, on top of any other tools you might use (e.g., Eclipse, which needs a ton of resources in its own right).

On a Pentium M 2.0 notebook with 2GB RAM and no Eclipse, in either XP or Linux, the emulator will start in maybe 90 seconds and will run tolerably well.

On a dual- or quad-core CPU with 2.5GHz or better speed, with 4GB RAM and no Eclipse, in either Vista or Linux, the emulator will start in under a minute and will run rather nicely.

Answer 2

You never mentioned what environment you're running in. Is it perhaps Vista? We had a discussion recently and it seems like the combination of the emulator and Vista just doesn't want to run well for some reason.

Either way something's definitely wrong. I have a laptop with a 2GHz Core2-Duo w/ 4GB RAM (rarely use more than 1.5) running Ubuntu 9.04 (32bit) and the emulator gets to a usable state in less than 30 seconds w/ Eclipse, Firefox, etc all eating more than their share of resources.

Answer 3

I see the Alarm clock crashing problem in on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. 2.4 GHz , 4GB RAM.

My development environment is: Eclipse 3.4.2, Using Android 1.6 SDK

The emulator takes about 2 minutes for me to start up. I think even 2 minutes is too slow. The iPhone simulator takes only a few seconds.