I installed the android SDK and eclipse plugin on my laptop, but I was surprised to find out that the emulator eats up 100% of one of my cpu cores. I have exactly the same setup on a desktop machine that does not have this issue. Both computers are running arch linux and both were updated yesterday. Granted, the desktop has better hardware than the laptop, but I was expecting to get closer to 50% cpu usage than 100% on the laptop. Both android virtual devices have the same specs: CPU: ARM Target: Android 2.3.3 - API Level 10 Skin: WVGA800 SD Card: 512M hw.lcd.density: 240 vm.heapSize: 24 hw.ramSize: 256 Laptop host has Intel Core 2 T7200 @ 2GHz cpu with 2Gb RAM. Desktop host has AMD Phenom II X4 940 @ 3GHz cpu with 8Gb RAM. The android emulator uses only 1 core and here are the CPU usage results: Laptop: Cpu0 : 22.8%us, 76.5%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.3%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 11.2%us, 2.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 86.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2055484k total, 1860304k used, 195180k free, 5276k buffers Swap: 2000088k total, 106872k used, 1893216k free, 350780k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2026 xyz 20 0 396m 207m 7192 R 100 10.3 4:11.58 emulator-arm Desktop: Cpu0 : 0.7%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 1.3%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 5.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.9%id, 1.7%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 7666324k total, 6506808k used, 1159516k free, 1650960k buffers Swap: 8988348k total, 0k used, 8988348k free, 2867300k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 2811 xyz 20 0 392m 220m 6276 S 8 2.9 0:33.58 emulator-arm Is there any way I can improve the emulator performance on the laptop? [UPDATE] I ran the emulator with the same settings, on the same laptop under Win7 and after starting up, it didn't use 100% of a CPU core unlike under linux. Also, I tried running the emulator from a terminal in Linux and I get this message when I don't get it under the desktop Linux host: Could not configure '/dev/hpet' to have a 1024Hz timer. This is not a fatal error, but for better emulation accuracy type: 'echo 1024 /proc/sys/dev/hpet/max-user-freq' as root. I'm not really familiar with rtc or hpet, but it doesn't seem that max-user-freq setting does anything, I still get the same warning.