Speeding up Your Android Emulator

The main problem to develop and testing an android application is their Emulator. Almost all of the android developers has complaints about the slowness of the Emulator. Although the current system image has built-in GPU support (Android 4.0.3 r2). With Android’s growing reliance on using the GPU to improve performance. But I, personally, dont like the slowness of Android Emulator and it really kill too many times of mine. So I got some research and found three solutions that are described below:

1. Emulator Snapshot
2. x86 hardware acceleration (Intel HAXM)
3. Use BlueStack Emulator

Using Emulator Snapshot: 

The first solution to speed up the emulator is to use the snapshot option of the android emulator.
After first boot the full emulator state is dumped to hard drive and on next startup the state gets read back to the memory without going through time-consuming Android startup procedure. This shortens boot time from several minutes to a couple of seconds.

To use snapshot functionality, you need to enable it in the AVD emulator settings when creating (or editing) a new emulator.

After enabling snapshot support in the emulator, you need to start it via the AVD manager by selecting the emulator, clicking Start… and making sure the options Launch from snapshot and Save to snapshot are chosen. The emulator is then started with a click on Launch.

Problems: 

The GPU option cannot be enabled when the snapshot option is also enabled. So GPU featured application cannot be done using snapshot enabled.

x86 hardware accelerator (Intel HAXM): 

Android usually runs on ARM architecture, which is very different from x86 architecture of desktop PCs and the emulator has to translate all OS instructions from ARM to x86 for Android to run. You can avoid that by using an Intel x86 image of Android with Intel HAXM accelerator.

1. Download HAXM installer with Android SDK manager by selecting Extras -> Intel Hardware Acceleration Execution Manager.
2. Install HAXM by running IntelHAXM.exe (Windows) or IntelHAXM.dmg (OS X) from extras/Intel/Hardware_Accelerated_Execution_Manager folder. You can find “extras” directory in your Android SDK directory.
3. After installing HAXM you have to download one of the Intel x86 emulator images using SDK Manager.
4. Create an ADV using the installed Intel x86 system image.
5. After create the AVD, start the emulator by selecting it from the ADV manager's available ADV list.

Known Issues: For MAC user Intel HAXM may causes unexpected issues. To overcome the unexpected behaviour, please follow the link. 

BlueStack Emulator:

Although the BlueStack emulator is not a official Android emulator from Google, I will give this a plus for its outstanding implementation. It is the fastest Android emulator I have ever tried to develop my Android application. You can get the both Windows and Mac version for the Emulator for free at this site:

http://www.bluestacks.com/

I have discussed about the installation and integration steps in another post. You can visit the post at this link and feel free to comment on this.