We love Android Studio because Android development has never been easier thanks to the Google-made IDE.

Nevertheless, it can be annoyingly slow at times. Especially after ver 1.0 was released, random lags occur more often than ever, to such an extent that typing a single line of code can make the whole program freeze several times.

Yes, damn you dear.

This sluggishness hindered our workflow a lot, so each of us set out to find ways to deal with it. Here are a few tricks we’ve come across:

1. Increasing Android Studio’s Memory Heap:

   Android Studio, like other Java applications, is known for hogging an insane amount of memory while running. Unless enough memory is allocated to the IDE at launch, disk swapping will start kicking in and if you’re not using a SSD, God bless you.

   Open the file [AS Installation Folder]\studio64.exe.vmoptions or studio.exe.vmoptions, depending on which version you’re using.

   For Mac die-hard you can find the file at /Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/bin/studio.vmoptions. Thanks Yonatan for pointing that out. :)

   In it you’re likely to find these two lines at the top:

   -Xms128m
   -Xmx750m
   

   Increase the two values to something reasonable, e.g. -Xms256 and -Xmx1024. You can boost the second value to 2048 if you like; my coworker whose computer has 8G of RAM doesn’t find any issue with -Xmx2048 either.

   After you’re done, restart AS and if you’ve checked Show memory indicatorin Settings/Appearance, you’ll see something like this at the bottom-right corner:

   In our case, this works like a charm. No more stutters while typing.

   Farewell, lags.

2. Speeding up Gradle build time

   One of the reasons developers are still hesistant to ditch Eclipse is because of Gradle.

   Although it’s indeed a nice build system and there are many benefits to using it, even the simplest Gradle calls are pretty slow and time-consuming. As a consequence, our workflow includes a lot of unavoidable waiting, and sometimes we even forget what needs to be tested after AS finishes its laborious building processes.

   There are a few things we do to boost Gradle’s speed.

   First, go to Settings/Compiler and check everything, except for the 2nd option Make project automatically. For VM Options, we use these configurations:

   -Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
   

   Next, add the following lines to gradle.properties in your project directory:

   org.gradle.daemon=true
   org.gradle.jvmargs=-Xmx2048m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8
   org.gradle.parallel=true
   org.gradle.configureondemand=true
   

   Refer to this blog post for a detailed explanation for these settings.

3. Accelerating the emulator with hardware virtualization

   Although the Android emulator is not part of Android Studio, it’s well worth mentioning that if you’re using one of the newer Intel CPUs which support hardware virtualization, the emulator can beamazingly fast. Check out this article for how to set it up on your machine.

That’s it folks, we hope you find these tricks helpful, and if you know about other methods to make Android Studio faster (even a little bit), please tell us!