Performance of app on Android Phone Emulator vs Actual Device ?

Question

I am working on a compute intensive app for Android. I do not have any device yet to test performance. However, the performance on emulator is a bit slower than expected.

I see an old question about some estimation of emulator vs device. What are your experiences while developing apps with recent SDK Froyo/2.2. Is performance observed on emulator is slower than actual device.

Please share your experience and the specs of your dev machine and mobile devices, both.

Note: To get virtual device's CPU speed one can run cat /proc/cpuinfo from adb shell. How is this comparable to actual device's CPU frequency?

      Processor       : ARM926EJ-S rev 5 (v5l)
      BogoMIPS        : 240.02

Answer 1

Quick answer. I have found the emulator to be slower than real devices, even on my relatively fast PC.

Answer 2

From a CPU standpoint, the emulator tends to be slower than actual hardware, presumably due to the overhead of converting ARM bytecodes to x86 ones on the fly.

From a graphics standpoint, the emulator tends to be dramatically slower than actual hardware, because the emulator lacks hardware graphics acceleration (regardless of the quality of the host computer's video card).

From a disk I/O standpoint, the emulator tends to be faster than actual hardware, particularly on write operations. Flash writes can be very slow, depending on a wide range of criteria (wear leveling, percentage of the flash storage that is in use, etc.). Brad Fitzpatrick covered this topic in his Writing zippy Android applications presentation at the 2010 Google I|O conference.

From a network standpoint, the emulator can be faster than actual hardware, because WiFi or wired Ethernet hooked up to broadband will typically be faster than a mobile data connection.

Answer 3

Yes true the emulator is slower than a real device. I have quite a decent development computer and it still is slower.

Here are my specs.

• CPU: AMD Phenom X4 940BE (3GHz)
• RAM: 8GB Corsair (800MHz)
• GFX: Nvidia 9800 GTX+
• MBD: Asus M3A78T
• HDD: WesternDigital Velociraptor SATA2 (10k RPM)
• OS: Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 64bit

And still it is quite slow compared to a real device.