Gingerbread emulator instance is much more sluggish than Froyo and below. Why?

Question

I'm not sure if anyone else noticed it, but the Gingerbread emulator runs like a dog, with both scrolling, navigating, interaction - all taking much longer and being much choppier. I even got an ANR in the browser when I tried to use it: http://www.androidpolice.com/2010/12/06/walkthrough-and-hands-on-with-the-gingerbread-ui-the-new-gingerbread-keyboard-in-all-its-sexiness/ (see towards the bottom).

I've just read about the new StrictMode at http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-gingerbread-api-strictmode.html and about all the performance improvements in Gbread, but my experience so far suggests just the opposite.

Can we get to the bottom of this? I find myself dreading bringing up an instance of Gingerbread at this point.

Answer 1

All the answers above have their merits and should be considered but keep in mind Google implementation of a virtual machine for simulating devices is not exactly as good as those from Microsoft and Apple there may not be much you can do but make sure you optimize the configuration and getting a better machine.

With the introduction of Honeycomb the android system is using more graphics power to do the rendering of the UI. This when run on a simulator can not natively use the graphical power of your PC hardware but most emulate the hardware on the phone which always results in lose of performance. More generic X86 emulators have become available such as VMWare but this may take some time to be available to the Android SDK. Until an X86 port of Android Honeycomb is available that can take advantage of your native GPU the emulator will be sluggish.

The only real solution is to buy a Honeycomb device for development work.

Answer 2

When you create your new GingerBread (API level 9) AVD, give it a realistic amount of RAM.

For example the Nexus S has 512MB

You do this in the "Create new Android Virtual Device (AVD)" Dialog.

Press "New..." to add a new hardware parameter and choose "Device ram size", click OK.

Edit the default amount from 96 to 512.

Answer 3

I saw a discussion of this elsewhere which suggested that the emulator parameters weren't setup well. If you give the emulator more memory it apparently becomes much more usable.

Answer 4

Now that you can easily edit AVDs, I have tried playing around with some of the settings for my Gingerbread AVD, and it's finally pretty usable.

• SD Card: 500MiB
• Skin: WVGA800
• Abstracted LCD density: 240
• Cache partition size: 128MB
• Max VM application heap size: 48
• Device ram size: 512

My guess is that the RAM and max VM heap are the most important ones, but I figured it'd be better to include all of the settings, so you can try these out as a starting point and then tweak.

Answer 5

My Suggestions:

Only attach an SD Card if you need it and most likely don't allocate more then you need. This must be emulated in some fashion.

Any other properties should not be inflated beyond your target device. If you increase the VM application heap size and you exceed values of real devices they will have crashes that you did not even notice during development.

Admittedly the defaults are not enoughs for certain applications and the Device Ram should be at least 258 to the limits of your target android device. Also remember that if your development host machine is low on memory then the memory you allocated for your emulator will have to be swapped and providing a smaller amount will avoid unnecessary page hits.

Answer 6

After changing the screen resolution, the device ram, letting the device "warm up" and running on fresh new hardware I recorded the Honeycomb emulator speed.

Result at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7OR8vPsIak

I find it not much different then Gingerbread on older hardware. I do hope the host-accelerated GL finds its way to the SDK soon. For now plain development might be possible, but UX creation or demoing is impossible.