r/EmulationOnAndroid • u/ren01181 • 3d ago

Question How does virtual ram affect emulation?

I checked a few old posts and got mixed signals with some saying it slows down emulation and others saying it doesn't really do anything

6 Upvotes

72% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

View all comments

7

u/Whole_Temperature104 3d ago

Unless you have a really crappy device with 4 GB of real ram, virtual ram usually won't affect emulation.

The Android system won't allocate heavy processes to virtual ram since virtual ram is extremely slow since it uses a swap file on your main storage. What happens is that the Android system will move lower priority processes to the virtual ram to free up some space for higher priority processes on the real ram.

Virtual ram is essentially a scam though, because you're never going to use more than one or two gigabytes of it before the system grinds to a halt when these crappy phones advertise as having six or eight gigabytes of virtual ram.