Why does Android AVD take so long to start up?

Question

I got the Hello, Android program to work after reading the tutorials from Google's developer website, but it takes SO long for the AVD to load up! Plus, in the console section in the bottom part of Eclipse, two of the lines were written in red, which I'm guessing is bad. It takes around a minute for the AVD to start running the actual program. This is what the console printout looks like:

[2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] ------------------------------ [2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] Android Launch! [2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] adb is running normally. [2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] Performing com.example.helloandroid.HelloAndroid activity launch [2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] Automatic Target Mode: Preferred AVD 'my_avd' is not available. Launching new emulator. [2010-08-06 12:32:38 - HelloAndroid] Launching a new emulator with Virtual Device 'my_avd' [2010-08-06 12:32:54 - HelloAndroid] New emulator found: emulator-5554 [2010-08-06 12:32:54 - HelloAndroid] Waiting for HOME ('android.process.acore') to be launched... [2010-08-06 12:34:05 - HelloAndroid] WARNING: Application does not specify an API level requirement! [2010-08-06 12:34:05 - HelloAndroid] Device API version is 8 (Android 2.2) [2010-08-06 12:34:05 - HelloAndroid] HOME is up on device 'emulator-5554' [2010-08-06 12:34:05 - HelloAndroid] Uploading HelloAndroid.apk onto device 'emulator-5554' [2010-08-06 12:34:05 - HelloAndroid] Installing HelloAndroid.apk... [2010-08-06 12:35:07 - HelloAndroid] Success! [2010-08-06 12:35:07 - HelloAndroid] Starting activity com.example.helloandroid.HelloAndroid on device [2010-08-06 12:35:11 - HelloAndroid] ActivityManager: Starting: Intent { act=android.intent.action.MAIN cat=[android.intent.category.LAUNCHER] cmp=com.example.helloandroid/.HelloAndroid }

Now that I looked at the times, I started to run the program at 12:32, and it finally had my program on the screen at 12:35, so thats 3 minutes. Is this a normal amount of time I have to wait? If it isn't, any suggestions on how to make it faster? Thanks in advances for anyone who makes this easier for me to understand!

Answer 1

Well the AVD is a totally different architecture from say a Windows PC. Windows usually runs on 32bit or 64bit. On Intel or AMD processors. The Instructions for the processor are written in x86. The way binary and machine code works/runs is different to each arcitechture. The android package that you have uploaded onto the device has to be compiled on the AVD architechture. The Emulator has to emaulate ARM architechture so the instruction sent to the CPU is different. This takes time to compile this code. Hope this answers it. Any questions?