vmware player not working properly for blackberry 10 dev alpha

Question

I am trying to use the blackberry 10 emulator on my Core i3 laptop, but the performance is horrendous.

I am using Windows 7 and the BB10 dev alpha simulator image. I am using the safe option when booting up BB, because without it there are weird visual artefacts.

The emulator is unusably slow and I have enabled 2 cores on the VMWare emulator as detailed here: https://developer.blackberry.com/devzone/develop/simulator/simulator_improving_performance.html

What can I do to improve the simulator performance? It takes more than half an hour to boot the simulator and it is almost completely unusable.

Answer 1

I found the problem. All I had to do was to reboot, enter my BIOS by pressing delete, Go to CPU settings and enable Virtualisation. This made a huge difference. Can't believe I missed that in the documentation.

Answer 2

The simulator is notoriously resource hungry. Your problem is probably a combination of CPU, RAM and HDD. Lack of RAM is the main culprit. I find that anything less than 8GB and it runs like a dog.

Ideal setup is:

• 8GB RAM
• Solid State Drive (I have a Samsung 830 and it is lightning fast)
• Sandy/Ivy Bridge Intel i7 CPU