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I have read a lot of complaints and problems about Android Virtual Device (AVD) taking a lot of time to load, but people were often talking about just few seconds delays.

In my case, it takes about 15 minutes(!) to load, and even then it also freezes or reacts very slowly. I have already un- and reinstalled once, but nothing changed.

I also have problems with Eclipse, but I am going to post a separate question for it.

I am running it on a slightly old PC, with Intel Core Duo CPU, 2 GB RAM, plenty of HD space, Windows XP SP3.

Do you think the problem is in having too little RAM? Is there a log file somewhere that can help me in understanding what is going wrong?


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2GB RAM is not much, but you should be able to run the emulator with it. Try to close as much other programs as possible before starting the emulator.

It is my experience that the AVD startup time increases with the amount of virtual hardware you add to the AVD, so keep this simple. Also I noticed that Android 3.0 or higher AVDs can be rather sluggish in the emulator compared to the 2.x versions. However, their performance might improve if you increase the "Device ram size" and/or "Max VM application heap size" hardware properties (see also this post) I found some other tips in this post but I didn't try them myself.

If you have Eclipse up and running you can check the logcat while the AVD is starting.

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In the logcat, I got the following errors (+ a large number of Warnings) - E/Netd(31): Unable to bind netlink socket: No such file or directory - E/Netd(31): Unable to open quota2 logging socket - E/PhonePolicy(35): Could not preload class for phone policy: com.android.internal.policy.impl.PhoneWindow$ContextMenuCallback –  Bob Dec 5 '11 at 17:10
There are always a lot of errors and warnings on startup, I think most are nothing to worry about. Any memory-related errors/warnings? –  THelper Dec 6 '11 at 8:37
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