Android Emulator Slow Mac
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Android Emulators are a great tool to run Android Apps on PC. There are a great many Android Emulators available in the market. However, slow performance of Android Emulator can ruin that experience.
Slow performance of Android Emulators is a recurrent issue, especially BlueStacks. BlueStacks is one of the most popular Android Emulators there is. But it isn’t the most convenient piece of software to use. BlueStacks is highly demanding and heavy on PC.
Then, how are we supposed to fix it? How to Speed Up BlueStacks or any Android Emulator for that matter? Continue Reading to know how to speed up BlueStacks.
How to Speed Up BlueStacks or Any other Android Emulator?
1. Make Sure you are Using the Best Available to Speed up the Android Emulator
No, we aren’t talking about the best piece of Hardware or CPU. Making Sure that your BlueStacks is updated to its latest version can help improve the performance of the software noticeably.
The latest version of BlueStacks is BlueStacks 4 i.e. on the date of writing it. You can check for the latest update from the app itself or you can simply visit BlueStacks.
2. Update Drivers to Speed up BlueStacks
Graphics Drivers have the most evident impact on the gaming experience. If your BlueStacks software is running fine but the gaming doesn’t seem as impressive as it should, an outdated Graphics Driver can be the issue. In order to update graphics drivers:
- Search and Open Device Manager from the Start Menu.
- Search for the Display Adapters from the list.
- Click on it and expand
- Right Click on Graphics tab and click Update to update the drivers.
3. Allocate More System Resources to Speed up the Android Emulator
If BlueStacks is running slow on your PC, it may be because of the insufficient allocation of RAM and CPU Capacity allotted for BlueStacks to function.
In the recent updates, BlueStacks has started to include the option to manage the system resources allocated to BlueStacks Android Emulator. In order to Speed up BlueStacks, you can increase the amount of resources assigned to BlueStacks. To do so:
- Open the emulator.
- Then click on Settings on the top right-hand corner of the screen.
- Again click on Settings to open a new window with all the different settings.
- Click on the Engine Tab
- Manage RAM and CPU Cores allotted to BlueStacks to Function Properly.
4. Turn Off the Antivirus for the moment to Speed up the Android Emulator
Not all us have PCs that are equipped with the best-in-industry specs. We use average PCs with average performance and some Antivirus Software can be heavy on the system. Even if you are using a lightweight Antivirus Software, it won’t be a bad idea to close/pause the Antivirus tool for the moment while you are using BlueStacks to haul down the workload a bit. This can instantly boost the system performance and help speed up BlueStacks.
5. Turn Off Background Processes
Similar to Antiviruses, there are a lot of background processes that can hamper the performance of your PC in general and can be the reason behind BlueStacks running slow. In order to speed up BlueStacks Android Emulator, you can stop these background processes in order to give your system a quick boost.
Turning off the Background Processes can have an instant impact on the performance of BlueStacks on your PC.
6. Use PC Optimizer Software to Speed up the Android Emulator
PC Optimizing Software are created to help increase the performance of your PC in general and free up memory and CPU being used from the unwanted processes. This, in turn, has a direct impact on any software running on your PC and hence, can help speed up BlueStacks.
There is a plethora of PC Optimization Software available in the market. However, we suggest using Advanced System Optimizer to get the best out of your Windows PC. Let’s talk about Advanced System Optimizer in a bit more detail.
Advanced System Optimizer:
This Advanced System Optimizer is one of the most feature packed PC Optimization Software available in the market. Advanced System Optimizer can provide an instant boost to your PC Performance with the help of its extensive list of tools and perks.
Click Here to Download Advanced System Optimizer ($49.95)
- Memory Optimizer: Advanced System Optimizer comes equipped with a Memory Optimizer tool that can help free-up System RAM by clearing unwanted background processes and cleaning junk.
- Game Optimizer: It also features a separate Game Optimizer which is intended to provide an instant boost to system performance before playing games or running software that are heavy on the system.
- Driver Updater: The Driver Updater helps keep all the system drivers updated automatically. Keeping the System Drivers up-to-date helps maintain optimal PC Performance.
- System Cleaner: Sometimes it isn’t the background processes that cause the system to slow down but the accumulated clutter and junk files. Advanced System Optimizer features a System Cleaner that automatically gets rid of all the junk and clutter on your system to speed up PC Performance.
With all these amazing features and much more, Advanced System Optimizer is truly the real deal and can surely help speed up BlueStacks performance. To know more about or download Advanced System Optimizer, visit Advanced System Optimizer.
So, this was all from our end on how to speed up BlueStacks. Do let us know if you tried these hacks and solutions and if they helped speed up BlueStacks, We love hearing from you.
Recommended Readings:
The Question :
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it focuses on one problem only by editing this post.
Closed 2 years ago.
I have got a 2.67 GHz Celeron processor, and 1.21 GB of RAM on a x86 Windows XP Professional machine.
My understanding is that the Android Emulator should start fairly quickly on such a machine, but for me, it doesn’t. I have followed all the instructions in setting up the IDE, SDKs, JDKs and such and have had some success in starting the emulator quickly, but that is very rare. How can I, if possible, fix this problem?
Even if it starts and loads the home screen, it is very sluggish. I have tried the Eclipse IDE in version 3.5 (Galileo) and 3.4 (Ganymede).
- Alternate is Genymotion. genymotion.com. This is much mcuh faster. Straightforward installation.
- I have found the emulator to run way (and by way I mean waaaay) faster on linux. I’ve got a laptop with dualboot, on windows the emulator takes about 15 minutes to start up, with linux about 30 seconds. I do not know about other operating systems like OSX, but feels like a windows thing to me.
- Android Studio 2.0 is reported to not only have a much faster emulator, but employ “instant run”, which allows certain changes in your source, such as the XML, to be deployed in seconds to the target without the APK having to be rebuilt and redeployed. See android-developers.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/…
- i think your ram is very small for an emulator to run faster.
- One way of avoiding confused comments could be to have a little notice box saying the question is older than, say, 2 years old. Tech is changing rapidly, and you would want age to affect rank, even though the question shouldn’t be closed/archived as on lesser sites.
The Answer 1
Update
You can now enable the Quick Boot option for Android Emulator. That will save emulator state, and it will start the emulator quickly on the next boot.
Click on Emulator edit button, then click Show Advanced Setting. Then enable Quick Boot
like below screenshot.
Android Development Tools (ADT) 9.0.0 (or later) has a feature that allows you to save state of the AVD (emulator), and you can start your emulator instantly. You have to enable this feature while creating a new AVD or you can just create it later by editing the AVD.
Also I have increased the Device RAM Size
to 1024
which results in a very fast emulator.
Refer to the given below screenshots for more information.
Creating a new AVD with the save snapshot feature.
Launching the emulator from the snapshot.
And for speeding up your emulator you can refer to Speed up your Android Emulator!:
The Answer 2
IMPORTANT NOTE: Please first refer to the Intel list about VT to make sure your CPU supports Intel VT.
HAXM Speeds Up the Slow Android Emulator
HAXM stands for – “Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager”
Currently, it supports only Intel® VT (Intel Virtualization Technology).
The Android emulator is based on QEMU. The interface between QEMU and the HAXM driver on the host system is designed to be vendor-agnostic.
Steps for Configuring Your Android Development Environment for HAXM
Update Eclipse:Make sure your Eclipse installation and the ADT plug-in are fully up-to-date.
Update your Android Tools:After each Eclipse plug-in update, it is important to update your Android SDK Tools. To do this, launch the Android SDK Manager and update all the Android SDK components. To take advantage of HAXM, you must be on at least release version 17.
- Download the x86 Atom System Images and the Intel Hardware Accelerated Execution Manager Driver. Follow the image below:
Install the HAXM Driver by running “IntelHaxm.exe”. It will be located in one of the following locations:
C:ProgramFilesAndroidandroid-sdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
C:Users<user>adt-bundle-windows-x86_64sdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager
If the installer fails with the message that Intel VT must be turned on, you need to enable this in the BIOS. See the description for how to do this in Enabling Intel VT (Virtualization Technology) .
- Create a new x86 AVD: Follow the image below:
- Or as for new SDK,
The Answer 3
Try Android x86. It’s much faster than the Google Android emulator. Follow these steps:
- Install VirtualBox.
- Download the ISO file that you need.
- Create a virtual machine as Linux 2.6/Other Linux, 512 MB RAM, HD 2 GB. Network: PCnet-Fast III, attached to NAT. You can also use a bridged adapter, but you need a DHCP server in your environment.
- Install Android x86 on the emulator, run it.
- Press Alt+F1, type
netcfg
, remember the IP address, press Alt+F7. - Run cmd on your Windows XP system, change the directory to your Android tools directory, type
adb connect <virtual_machine_IP>
. - Start Eclipse, open the ADT plugin, find the device, and enjoy!
Android Emulator Slow Pc
The Answer 4
UPDATE: The latest version of Android studio (2.x) made major improvements to the bundled emulator. It’s responsive and has a whole bunch of features.
For those still interested:Try using Genymotion. You can download a version for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux after registering. A plugin for Eclipse is also available:
The installation of the plugin can be done by launching Eclipse and going to “Help / Install New Software” menu, then just add a new Update Site with the following URL: http://plugins.genymotion.com/eclipse. Follow the steps indicated by Eclipse.
This emulator is fast and responsive.
GenyMotion allows you to control various sensors of your device including the battery level, signal strength, and GPS. The latest version now also contains camera tools.
The Answer 5
The emulator included in your (old) version of Eclipse is very slow.
Recent emulators are faster than they use to be in 2010. Update your SDK/IDE.
Personally, 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 Answer 6
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.
The Answer 7
Intel released recommended installation instructions for the ICS emulator on May 15, 2012. This worked for me. The emulator is now fast and the UI is smooth.
The first half of the instructions are detailed enough, so I will assume you were able to install the Intel x86 Atom System Image(s) using the Android SDK manager, as well as Intel HAXM.
Now to ensure that everything else is set up so you can enjoy a highly performing emulator:
And start it:
If HAXM is working properly, you may see this message when launching the emulator:
HAX is working and emulator runs in fast virtual mode
Otherwise, you may see this error:
HAX is not working and the emulator runs in emulation mode emulator:
Failed to open the hax module
Use GPU emulation. You cannot use the Snapshot option when using GPU emulation as of this writing. Ensure that GPU emulation is set to “yes”.
Set the device memory to 1024 MB or more, but not more than the Intel HAXM setting. I use 1024 MB per device and 2048 for HAXM.
Always double-check the settings after saving! The emulator is very picky about what it allows you to set, and it will revert configurations without telling you.
With these settings the software keyboard no longer appears, nor do the on-screen back, menu, and recent keys. This appears to be a limitation of the current ICS Intel x86 system image. You will need to use the keyboard shortcuts.
On Mac OS you will need to hold fn + control for the F1 – F12 keys to work. Page up/down/left/right can be performed using control + arrow keys.
The Answer 8
You can create emulator.bat with following command to start the emulator. It will start faster.
Or on Unix (Mac or Linux flavors):
The Answer 9
I’ve noticed that the emulator starts much faster if there’s no Dalvik Debug Monitor Server (DDMS) connected. So if you start the emulator from Virtual Device Manager “SDK Setup.exe” and Eclipse is not started, the emulator works faster.
If you start the emulator from Eclipse: DDMS is there, so sometimes the emulator is extremely slow, but sometimes it’s faster.
The Answer 10
Emulators are slow. There’s really nothing you can do about it, but there are alternatives to the emulator.
To make your emulator faster, you can host a GPU and use a lighter Android version (Android 2.3 (Gingerbread)).Developing on a Mac would be better. Why use an emulator, BTW? Using a real phone makes more sense.
The Answer 11
As of Revision 17 of Android SDK Tools, the emulator can use graphic acceleration and CPU-provided extensions for better efficiency. The prerequisites and full configuration and user notes are at:
For enabling GPU aceleration, run the emulator from the command line or add “-gpu on” to the additional emulator command line options in the AVD configuration.
For using the CPU machine extensions, you have to install the driver (caution because it can conflict with existing VirtualBox or VMware drivers). Once it’s installed it will be used automatically whenever you use an x86-based AVD.
The Answer 12
Try to disable your antivirus. Maybe it will make emulator a little bit faster.
The Answer 13
Android SDK rev. 17 supports Virtual Machine Acceleration using AMD and Intel virtualization technologies.
This feature can improve the emulator performance a lot!
See the following section in the Android emulator documentation for more details: Configuring Virtual Machine Acceleration
Don’t forget to install the appropriate driver for your operating system:
After you have installed the drivers and downloaded an Android X86 system image (as described in the documentation) you should be able to create a new AVD using the x86 image:
For example:
- Target: Intel Atom x86 System Image – API Level 10
- CPU/ABI: Intel Atom (x86)
Android Emulator Slow Mac Os
The Answer 14
The option -cpu-delay <delay>
described in Emulator Startup Options can help.
The Answer 15
The emulator seems to slow itself down when idle. This is made apparent by rapidly mousing over the keys on the side and observing the light-up responses. As a workaround, I pass -icount auto
to QEMU when starting the emulator. You can make a batch file called my_avd.bat
to do it for you:
@my_avd
— launch a virtual device named ‘my_avd’-no-boot-anim
— disable animation for faster boot-qemu args...
— pass arguments to qemu-icount [N|auto]
— enable virtual instruction counter with 2^N clock ticks per instruction
This made animations buttery smooth and sped up adb install
tenfold.
The Answer 16
Android emulator release 9 has a new “snapshot” feature. You can save the state of the emulator (make an image of the emulator) and avoid booting when you start the emulator.
The Answer 17
You can review the emulator issues on the Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools talk, starting a 0:40:20.
The emulator runs slowly because the complete Android environment is running on emulated hardware and the instructions are executed on an emulated ARM processor as well.
The main choking point is rendering since it’s not running on any dedicated hardware but it’s actually being performed through software rendering. Lowering the screen size will drastically improve emulator performance. Getting more/faster memory isn’t going to help.
They’ve mentioned, at the time, that they’re developing an interface that would allow the emulator to pipe certain instructions through the host hardware, so eventually, you’ll be able to leverage emulator performances with the raw power of desktop hardware.
The Answer 18
The current (May 2011) version of the emulator is slow particularly with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) primarily because the emulator does not support hardware GL — this means that the GL code gets translated into software (ARM software, in fact) which then gets emulated in software in QEMU. This is crazy-slow. They’re working on this problem and have it partially solved, but not with any sort of release quality.
Check out the video Google I/O 2011: Android Development Tools to see it in action — jump to about 44 minutes.
The Answer 19
Use the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator
First, install the Intel x86 Emulator Accelerator (HAXM). This can be downloaded directly from Intel or using Android SDK Manager. In the SDK Manager, it’s located under Extras.
In the version of Android Studio I used (0.8.9), Android SDK Manager downloads HAXM but doesn’t actually run the installer (I assume this will be fixed in later releases). To run the installer I had to go to C:Program Files (x86)Androidandroid-studiosdkextrasintelHardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager and manually launch intelhaxm.exe.
HAXM works with Intel devices, so created a new Emulator with Intel CPU.
Create a new AVD using Intel Atom x86
This improved things considerably, but the emulator was still feeling a bit sluggish. The final step was selecting Use Host GPU in Android Virtual Device Manager (AVD).
After these changes, Android Emulator was launching in 5-10 seconds and running without any noticeable lag.Be aware that these features are hardware dependent (CPU/GPU) and may not work on some systems.
The Answer 20
Try Genymotion for Android Studio. Blazing fast! Just needs one time installation. No more AVD pain.
The Answer 21
A new option is the Visual Studio Emulator for Android–it’s fast, Hyper-V, x86, and free to download even without VS.
The Answer 22
To add further information to this.
I have recently upgraded my Ubuntu installation to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) which in turn updated my Java version to:
And now the emulator (although takes a while to start) seems to be running faster than previously.
It might be worth people upgrading their JVM.
The Answer 23
Here’s what I noticed nobody mentioned it at all.
Assign all available processors to the emulator
Here’s what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time. I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. I set it to use all available processors.
I’m using Windows 7.
When the Android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for “emulator-arm.exe” or “emulator-arm.exe *32″… Right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.
The Answer 24
After developing for a while, my emulator became brutally slow. I chose wipe user data, and it was much much better. I am guessing that it takes time to load up each APK file you’ve deployed.
The Answer 25
Android emulator is dead slow. It takes 800MB memory while running.If you are on Windows, You can use Microsoft Android Emulator. It is superb, provides you functionalities more than Android Studio Emulator. And most important it is fast ( consumes 13MB only).It comes with Visual Studio 2015 Technical Preview. I am using it and happy with it. I downloaded and installed entire VS pack, I need to look how we can install VS Emulator only.
EDIT:Try https://www.visualstudio.com/vs/msft-android-emulator/
The Answer 26
Well, since somebody suggested Android x86 as an alternative testing emulator, I’ll also present my favorite. This might not be an alternative for everyone, but for me it’s perfect!
Use the Bluestacks Player. It runs Android 2.3.4 and is very fluid and fast. Sometimes it is even faster than a normal device. The only downside is, that you can just test apps on the API Level 10 and just on one screen size, but it’s perfect just for testing if it’s working or not. Just connect the Player with the adb
by running
Android Emulator Slow Mac Air
After compiling, it installs instantly. It is very impressive, considering I have rather an average computer hardware (dual core with 4 GB of RAM).
The Answer 27
I had intermittent slow emulator (SDK v8.0) load times, up to three minutes on Intel Core i7 920 2.67 GHz CPU running on Xubuntu 10.04 VirtualBox 3.2.12 guest with Eclipse (3.6.1) loaded. I changed the VirtualBox guest memory from 1024 MB to 2048 MB and from that point on, I never experienced the slowness again (load times consistent at 33 seconds, CPU load consistent at 20%). Both Eclipse and the emulator are memory hogs.
The Answer 28
I noticed that the my emulator (Eclipse plugin) was significantly slowed by my Nvidia graphics card anti-aliasing settings. Removing 2x anti aliasing from the graphics menu and changing it to application controlled made it more responsive. It is still slow, but better than it used to be.
The Answer 29
To reduce your emulator start-up time you need to check the “Disable Boot Animation” before starting the emulator. Refer to the Android documentation.
If in case you don’t know, you do not need to close the emulator every-time you run/debug your app. If you click run/debug when it’s already open, your APK file will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. Emulator takes annoyingly long time only when it started the first time.
Here are some tips to speed up the Android emulator: How to speed up the Android Emulator by up to 400%.
The Answer 30
Good way to speed up Android Emulator and app testing is Install or Upgrade your Android Studio to Android Studio 2.0 version and then go to app open Settings/Preferences, the go to Build, Execution, Deployment → Instant Run. Click on Enable Instant Run. And After That This will ensure you have the correct gradle plugin for your project to work with Instant Run.
Android Studio Emulator Slow Mac
And Instant run will look like this
Android Emulator Slow Macbook Pro
However Android Studio is right now in Preview you can try it now.