Android emulator performance on linux
- by Rado
I installed the android SDK and eclipse plugin on my laptop, but I was surprised to find out that the emulator eats up 100% of one of my cpu cores. I have exactly the same setup on a desktop machine that does not have this issue. Both computers are running arch linux and both were updated yesterday.
Granted, the desktop has better hardware than the laptop, but I was expecting to get closer to 50% cpu usage than 100% on the laptop.
Both android virtual devices have the same specs:
CPU: ARM
Target: Android 2.3.3 - API Level 10
Skin: WVGA800
SD Card: 512M
hw.lcd.density: 240
vm.heapSize: 24
hw.ramSize: 256
Laptop host has Intel Core 2 T7200 @ 2GHz cpu with 2Gb RAM.
Desktop host has AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3GHz cpu with 8Gb RAM.
The android emulator uses only 1 core and here are the CPU usage results:
Laptop:
Cpu0 : 22.8%us, 76.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 11.2%us, 2.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 86.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2055484k total, 1860304k used, 195180k free, 5276k buffers
Swap: 2000088k total, 106872k used, 1893216k free, 350780k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2026 xyz 20 0 396m 207m 7192 R 100 10.3 4:11.58 emulator-arm
Desktop:
Cpu0 : 0.7%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu1 : 1.3%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu2 : 5.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.9%id, 1.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Cpu3 : 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 7666324k total, 6506808k used, 1159516k free, 1650960k buffers
Swap: 8988348k total, 0k used, 8988348k free, 2867300k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2811 xyz 20 0 392m 220m 6276 S 8 2.9 0:33.58 emulator-arm
Is there any way I can improve the emulator performance on the laptop?
[UPDATE] I ran the emulator with the same settings, on the same laptop under Win7 and after starting up, it didn't use 100% of a CPU core unlike under linux. Also, I tried running the emulator from a terminal in Linux and I get this message when I don't get it under the desktop Linux host:
Could not configure '/dev/hpet' to have a 1024Hz timer. This is not a
fatal error, but for better emulation accuracy type: 'echo 1024
/proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq' as root.
I'm not really familiar with rtc or hpet, but it doesn't seem that max-user-freq setting does anything, I still get the same warning.
