How to Speed Up Android Emulator on UX System
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