DEV Community

Krunal Bhalala
Krunal Bhalala

Posted on AI-assisted

My Android Emulator Was Eating 8 GB of RAM

I was working on a mobile app and noticed my Android emulator was regularly eating 7–8 GB of RAM on my Mac.

On a 16 GB machine, that gets painful pretty quickly.

So I started experimenting with ADB and the emulator configuration to see what I could safely remove or disable.

That turned into AVDSlim.

The result on my setup:

~8 GB RAM → ~1.5 GB

Startup time also dropped to around 1.5 seconds.

AVDSlim automates the tweaks instead of making you run a bunch of ADB commands manually. It also supports snapshots, benchmarking and headless/CI usage.

I’ve tested Firebase Auth, Google Sign-In, FCM and Maps successfully, although I’m sure there are edge cases I haven’t found yet.

It’s open source and MIT licensed.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/kdbhalala/avdslim

If you use Android emulators, I’d love to know:

How much RAM does yours use?

Top comments (0)