What hardware is needed to run the Android emulator fast?

Question

My home PC is an Intel E6300 with 4GB RAM. My company PC is an Intel i5 quadcore with 4GB RAM. I ran the latest Android emulator (came with SDK) on both PC's (both running Windows 7 x64), and it was unbearably slow on both PC's.

On my home PC, I ran Windows Phone 7 emulator and it worked smoothly. I booted up with my Hackintosh on the same PC and ran iPhone simulator and it also worked smoothly.

Anyways what kind of hardware is required to run Android emulator that smoothly, i7 with 16GB RAM? Or the Android emulator is so slow that even the top-of-the line desktop CPU's are not enough and I should get a real Android device?

Answer 1

It is not a problem with your environment, it is just that the emulator is very slow. Practically I use a real phone to do my tests. It is faster and tests are more realistic. But if you want to test your application on a lot of different Android versions and don't want to buy several phones, you will have to use the emulator from time to time.

The startup of the emulator is very slow. The good thing is that you only need to start the emulator once. If the emulator is already running and you run your app again, the emulator reinstalls the app relatively quickly. Of course, if you want to know how fast it will run on a phone, it is best to test it on a real phone.

Also try to run the emulator before you start eclipse. It should start a bit faster and try to disable antivir software.