LiveCode Forums

Windows 7 SP1 Prof
Android Emulator for an Android 4.1.2 phone

On LC 6.5.2 the response time of my stack in the emulator are good, usually less than 1 sec.
On LC 7.0 (dp5) most of the response times are now between 3 and 6 secs - unacceptable.
This applies to displaying a different (rather short) text on the same card, or displaying a data grid for selecting a menu item.
Some response times for just displaying different text on the card get longer after a data grid for item selection was displayed.
I do not want to post my stack here in the forum, but a slightly earlier version was submitted with Ticket#2014032010001474.
I can also submit the current version with a ticket and can provide additional information about the actual actions to someone at Runrev who might research the issue.

The slowdown does not occur in the Windows version of the stack (The stack is designed to be multi-platform).

I don't know how I can provide better steps-to-reproduce in this case.

Do others experience a similar slowdown? I would expect that as I am not really doing complex processing in this stack nor am I dealing with any excessive amounts of text.

Thanks,
Werner

Hi Werner,
I'd never trust the emulator on speed issues, it can't even get out of it's own way. Anything that takes that long to start up is going to be prone to other graphic/memory issues.
Do you have a real device to test with?

Simon

I stopped using the Android emulator ages ago because it's slow as hell (not LiveCodes fault). It's faster to use a cloud storage to sync it to my phone or tablet for testing and the same .apk will run great on the real deal (usually).

Unfortunately I don't have an Android device, so the emulator is my only option currently.
It was always slow to start up, but the app itself ran rather decently once it was started.
On LC 7.0 it has become almost unusable.

I would assume that I may not be the only one who is using the emulator and would be affected by such slowness.
I hope something can be done about it because the slowdown occurs when using the same stack with LC 7.0 instead of 6.5.2.

BTW, the speed is fine in the iOS simulator.

Thanks,
Werner

Well there is the issue that 7.0 makes apk's about twice as large as 6.5 does. Or adds 3.5 MB to the apk.
Not sure which, but I'm sure it doesn't help the emulator.

Simon

Hi all,

Just a quick note to say that the iOS and Android emulators are fundamentally different beasts: the Android emulator is a true emulator - it runs code compiled for ARM on an i386 machine. On the other hand, the iOS emulator runs native i386 code (i.e the LiveCode iOS emulator engine is a native i386 executable). Thus, code running on an iOS emulator will be much faster than in the Android emulator (in fact, it can often be faster than the device itself if your Mac is sufficiently powerful).

Regards,
Fraser