40 seconds

That is how long it takes to read the ROM files on the Android emulator. I wonder why it takes that long on a dual quad core xeon MacPro. A true workstation that is. It takes 7 seconds on my Nexus-One.

I hope it is not that the emulator is thwarted the give a more realistic timing. Because that would mean that users with less then 1GHz Snapdragon too will have abysmal load time.

Of course you don't have to load that often. If you leave the emulator using the back or home key just the GUI is stopped. The emulator continues running in the background for after another 3 minutes (after 1 sec of non activity on a lower priority). Then the emulator too terminates to preserve the device battery. But even then the ROM files will stay in memory and the emulator restart is fairly quick. Only if the device itself runs out of memory then the emulator is unloaded.

Or if you use the Quit menu. I added the Quit so there is a way to stop the emulator if needed. But realy you should not in normal operation.

I would welcome input from users of course. If things are realy unbareable slow on some systems I might be able to cache the rom files in flash memory. A classic trade space for speed it would be.