Configuring a usable Android emulator

Are you restarting the emulator often? You can just start it up once and then redeploy the app to the already running emulator...

Make sure to enable snapshots when creating an emulator. It will still have the ridiculous startup the very first time, but after that startup is quick and shutdown is slow. Much in line with what the blog author is saying, this feature was added after the initial launch and isn't checked by default.

Also make sure you aren't closing the emulator each time you finish running. Just leave it open in the background and running the app again later will deploy to the same instance as last time without any startup at all.

Sorry if you know all this, you'd be surprised how many people don't at Android meetups and the like. :)

This happens to me all the time. Every version of the emulator from the time I started with android in 2009 to present.

I NEVER leave it running on my machine when I retire for the night. Once or twice I woke up in the morning to see it somehow gobbling 100% of the CPU while idling, and the machine seemed close to overheating.