How to speed up Android Emulator on uX system - UPDATED

If you are developing for Android, you probably have already abandoned the emulator that comes with Android SDK, and are testing and debugging on a real device. I cannot blame you - the emulator is awfully slow. Well I have good news for you - you can speed it up, if you are using uX system (Unix like - Linux, Mac OS X, BSD).

The trick is very simple - and I suppose some of you have already activated it - mount /tmp folder into memory. The reason why the emulator is much more faster - is that when the emulator is started, the image is expanded into /tmp folder - and all the communication goes through there. Normally it goes through DiskIO, and the trick is to do it through much faster channel - memory.

Here is the way to do it in Linux:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

add the following line at the bottom:

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

This will mount your /tmp folder into memory.

Now you can type:

sudo mount /tmp

or restart the system. Enjoy the difference.

And here how it is done under Mac OS X (you can visit one article here - http://laclefyoshi.blogspot.de/2011/05/tmpfs-on-linux-and-mac.html):

sudo hdid -nomount ram://256000

this will give you something like /dev/rdisk2 - then use “2” in the following command instead of “X”:

sudo newfs_hfs /dev/diskX
sudo mount -t hfs /dev/diskX /tmp

This is something you should do every time you restart the system.

~Enjoy