Android Studio - Resource Hungry?

L.Jenkins

Does anyone else find Android Studio to be a bit of a resource hog? I've never used anything like it. It's as bad if not worse than Chrome.

Jimjones55

Yes, it's absurd sometimes.

Even on decent machines that cost 1K+ plus, it can be a bit much.

Buford T Justice

Yes, its a killer. Don't bother with it unless you have an ssd at least

L.Jenkins

Might give Visual Studio a go and how that is as an alternative then.

14ned

L.Jenkins wrote: »

Does anyone else find Android Studio to be a bit of a resource hog? I've never used anything like it. It's as bad if not worse than Chrome.

Android Studio is really JetBrain's IntelliJ underneath. And yes, it's dog slow, lots of recent bug reports landing on their issue tracker about just how slow.

Eclipse will be faster - which is really saying something. Visual Studio will be faster.

But in the end, all these IDEs are increasingly assuming you're on a fast SSD and have at least 16Gb of RAM. There is always vim and emacs for those who want a truly slick and fast UI.

Niall

Buford T Justice

Last I checked Xamarin was about 30 gigs when it was installed for android dev. Android studio runs to about 1.5

Talisman

It used to be the case that the IntelliJ program shortcut launched the 32-bit version of the IDE. The 64-bit IDE will use the 64-bit JVM which allows you to increase the heap size to over 2GB and also makes more efficient use of the processor. I'm not sure if this is still the case, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

i'm thinking of upgrading from 16gb to 32gb of RAM just for it. it's an insane resource hog when you've a few projects open and a lot of Chrome tabs.

colm_c

georgiecasey wrote: »

i'm thinking of upgrading from 16gb to 32gb of RAM just for it. it's an insane resource hog when you've a few projects open and a lot of Chrome tabs.

If you've not got an SSD, your money would get way more bang for buck upgrading that instead of ram.

On a side note I use IntelliJ a lot, can't say I've had any performance problems to be honest including running virtual machines.

Running it on a fairly beefy MacBook, so that might help.

14ned

colm_c wrote: »

If you've not got an SSD, your money would get way more bang for buck upgrading that instead of ram.

On a side note I use IntelliJ a lot, can't say I've had any performance problems to be honest including running virtual machines.

Running it on a fairly beefy MacBook, so that might help.

+100 on the SSD. I splurged on a 1Tb Samung 850 EVO some years ago for my dev machine, and I haven't looked back. By far and away the best thing you can do for a computer.

Recent MBP's have a NVMe SSD which can push 3Gb/sec (yes, giga), though for compilation it's mostly about access latency, and for that Linux is 70x faster than Windows. And the MBP's SSD access latency is actually worse than an old Crucial MX100 SSD interestingly. The latter has a much, much simpler firmware.

Still, in either case, we're talking 0.2ms vs 11ms for a HD

Niall

jester77

It is a resource hog, I try and keep the minimum open. It's also interesting to look at what else is running in terms of resources. iTerm, emulators and Franz are the other biggest culprits on my PC.

I try and use the terminal in android studio and test on real devices when resources are stretched and this helps a lot. 16GB and an SSD are really a minimum to not pull your hair out, plus restarting the PC at least once a week also helps.

14ned

All my Android development in the past has been done from the command line. No slower than desktop development. But then I exclusively target the native API with a JNI shim into the application.

Niall