Making android development less resource heavy!

Question

I have a dell studio 15 laptop with 2.2Ghz dual core processor and 4 GB ram running Vista. I recently downloaded the whole android development goodness and I find that my machine slows down considerably (its not the best machine money can buy but it should be fast enough for development).

Things that I have noticed: - Running the emulator eats up one of my cores entirely!! On an average it is using 40-45% of CPU processing power. It takes 7-9 min to start the emulator so I have to keep it running all the time and even on a running emulator it takes a couple of minutes for my simple apps to get loaded and run. - Eclipse pretty much consumes the rest of the other core. Eclipse with the android ADT is also extremely resource heavy.

So, my question is - what things can I tweak to make development for android somewhat more bearable with respect to my systems resources being used up?

Answer 1

I find a similar problem with the emulator - so I test and debug applications directly on my G1. That's probably the best advice I can give you.

Aside from that - disable EVERY plugin you dont need in eclipse. The machine I use to develop on is a 2yr old dell desktop with 1GB RAM, and it manages just fine with firefox and evolution open (I am running ubuntu desktop on it).

Answer 2

I'm leaning towards it being a Vista problem (note I didn't say Vista's FAULT).

I have a very similar machine to yours (actually slightly slower) running Ubuntu and I have no problems getting them all to play nicely together. As I write this I have FF, Eclipse, Emulator, Pidgin, and a few shells open and I'm only hitting about 40-45% on both processors w/ them SpeedStepped all the way down to 800MHz. I'm also only using about 1.3GB of RAM (out of 4). Out of all of those programs Eclipse is by far the most processor-hungry. It takes me less than a minute to get the emulator to a ready-to-use state (never actually timed it).

What JDK are you using?

Answer 3

I had a terrible time with Vista and Java programming Eclipse. The Mac and Linux guys sailed right along while my new, slick, fast Vista laptop had all kinds of problems, including hard-to-work-around file locking problems.

Next time I need Eclipse on a project, I'm booting up in Linux rather than Vista.

Answer 4

Vista has problems, when I use the exact same setup on Linux with same hardware only takes up 2 gigs and that is IDE running, emulator running, and browser running.

Under Vista its much higher in gigs of ram.

When I migrated to Linux did not change my Vista setup just used Ubuntu/wubi to run under Vista, no partition setup required. Make sure to chose 32 bit only.

Answer 5

Is Windows 7 any better for Android development with Eclipse? I'm looking to buy a new laptop and I'd like any advice about a solid, inexpensive notebook.