Is there a reason Android studio is so fucking resource hungry? XCode is running way better with a simulator open and the other Jetbrain IDEs are just fine as well and so is any other virtualization. It’s just Android Studio that sucks somehow.
I remember the Eclipse days of Android studio and let me tell you: this is a huge improvement for performance and stability.
In my experience Android Studio performs about as well as IntelliJ for a similarly sized project, especially if you use a modern build system like Gradle. The difference is that if you want your Android app to run on most phones, you need a whole bunch of extra work compared to producing a simple Java 21 .jar file.
It does a lot of Complicated Shit to make your life easier and that requires a lot of resources. If you follow the basic wizards, you’ll easily gather hundreds or thousands of source files (hidden from you, because you shouldn’t need to bother) for a simple Hello World because of compatibility layers and such. It’s also full of XML parsers, GUI visualisers, live UI renderers for different platforms, and maintains a constant index of all files for autocomplete and code analysis.
Give it plenty of RAM (8GB works on my machine) and it’ll happily truck along. It tries to minimize resource usage by default, but you can set the memory limit yourself to give it some more breathing room, that helps a lot. Also don’t run any emulators if you’re constrained on resources, of course.
Oh, and if you’re on Windows, try disabling your antivirus for a short while; IntelliJ works on lots of tiny files and that absolutely massacres performance with Windows Defender and many other live antivirus solutions.
If you don’t need all of the fancy shit Android Studio comes with, try Visual Studio Code. You’ll need to configure a whole bunch of plugins and maybe add some language servers if you want to work with the XML like on AS, but it doesn’t include the full range of features that bog down the IDE by default.
It has been shown to run faster in some benchmarks. This is usually due to hotspot optimizations performed at runtime by the VM, but also sometimes thanks to offloading the (often costly) deallocation of memory from the main thread. Since Java has a GC running in a background thread, the deallocation of memory occurs outside of the measured execution.
However, I remain convinced that while burst execution of a computation can perform on par with a language like C or Rust, the total resource usage of Java code is significantly worse. When taking into account the entire execution including GC and JIT compilation, it will have spent more memory and/or CPU cycles. It’s harder to quantify, but the overall performance experienced by the user becomes worse. Fans run more and battery time is lower.
And yeah, I’d say Java libraries are generally more poorly written than e.g. their Rust counterparts, for example not paying attention to the CPU cache (which is hard and sometimes impossible since Java still lacks value classes).
But they are slow. At least when you’re doing a lot of things at once on your machine (I run ~20 “microservices” for my local dev environment because it’s a goddamn distributed monolith, most of them are JVM). IntelliJ often grinds down to a halt. Other software on my laptop runs fine. Firefox doesn’t get slow at all.
Is there a reason Android studio is so fucking resource hungry? XCode is running way better with a simulator open and the other Jetbrain IDEs are just fine as well and so is any other virtualization. It’s just Android Studio that sucks somehow.
I remember the Eclipse days of Android studio and let me tell you: this is a huge improvement for performance and stability.
In my experience Android Studio performs about as well as IntelliJ for a similarly sized project, especially if you use a modern build system like Gradle. The difference is that if you want your Android app to run on most phones, you need a whole bunch of extra work compared to producing a simple Java 21 .jar file.
It does a lot of Complicated Shit to make your life easier and that requires a lot of resources. If you follow the basic wizards, you’ll easily gather hundreds or thousands of source files (hidden from you, because you shouldn’t need to bother) for a simple Hello World because of compatibility layers and such. It’s also full of XML parsers, GUI visualisers, live UI renderers for different platforms, and maintains a constant index of all files for autocomplete and code analysis.
Give it plenty of RAM (8GB works on my machine) and it’ll happily truck along. It tries to minimize resource usage by default, but you can set the memory limit yourself to give it some more breathing room, that helps a lot. Also don’t run any emulators if you’re constrained on resources, of course.
Oh, and if you’re on Windows, try disabling your antivirus for a short while; IntelliJ works on lots of tiny files and that absolutely massacres performance with Windows Defender and many other live antivirus solutions.
If you don’t need all of the fancy shit Android Studio comes with, try Visual Studio Code. You’ll need to configure a whole bunch of plugins and maybe add some language servers if you want to work with the XML like on AS, but it doesn’t include the full range of features that bog down the IDE by default.
It’s probably because it uses Java, which isn’t known for its speed
the java VM itself is actually pretty damn fast, sometimes even faster than native code because it can optimize code paths while it’s running
applications built with it tho, I’d say hit and miss but honestly we all know it’s a miss most of the time
It has been shown to run faster in some benchmarks. This is usually due to hotspot optimizations performed at runtime by the VM, but also sometimes thanks to offloading the (often costly) deallocation of memory from the main thread. Since Java has a GC running in a background thread, the deallocation of memory occurs outside of the measured execution.
However, I remain convinced that while burst execution of a computation can perform on par with a language like C or Rust, the total resource usage of Java code is significantly worse. When taking into account the entire execution including GC and JIT compilation, it will have spent more memory and/or CPU cycles. It’s harder to quantify, but the overall performance experienced by the user becomes worse. Fans run more and battery time is lower.
And yeah, I’d say Java libraries are generally more poorly written than e.g. their Rust counterparts, for example not paying attention to the CPU cache (which is hard and sometimes impossible since Java still lacks value classes).
AFAIK, JetBrains IDEs are also based on Java
Android Studio is a Jetbrains IDE itself!
I think that was his point. He said none of the other jetbrains ides are slow so it can’t just be because it’s java
But they are slow. At least when you’re doing a lot of things at once on your machine (I run ~20 “microservices” for my local dev environment because it’s a goddamn distributed monolith, most of them are JVM). IntelliJ often grinds down to a halt. Other software on my laptop runs fine. Firefox doesn’t get slow at all.
Android Studio itself doesn’t seem to be that resource hungry but the emulator on the other hand…
The emulator runs super well… If your host OS is Linux. If not, yeah, it’s useless.
I have had the exact opposite experience.
Xcode is also a pretty bad IDE feature-wise, it’s hard to compare the two.
IntelliJ is not so bad resources-wise, but it’s pretty RAM-hungry and so is the build process, that doesn’t help.