Speed up Android emulator

Do you have "Disable Boot Animation" checked?

Also, if that doesn't fix it, one thing that helps is that you never actually have to close the emulator screen while you're coding. If you click debug when it's already open, your APK will get uploaded to the emulator and start pretty much immediately. For some reason it took me a while to figure out that I didn't have to manually close the emulator.

One thing I learned that helped me is that once the emulator is open from your first debug run you DO NOT have to close it. Leave it open, and on your next debug run it will be ready to go without any load up time like when you first open it.

In regards to your slowness after startup I suspect it's just your computer. It runs very fast for me. It starts up in about 20 seconds or less, and once it's open my subsequent debugs load very fast.

I hope at least my first tip helps to save some of your sanity.

Here's what you can try. It does speed up the emulator for me, especially during loading time.I noticed the emulator is only using a single core of the available CPU. What I did is to set it to use all available processors.

I'm using Windows 7.

When the android emulator is starting, open up the Task Manager, look under the Process tab, look for "emulator-arm.exe" or "emulator-arm.exe *32" ...right click on it, select Processor Affinity and assign as much processor as you like to the emulator.