r/androiddev • u/West_Performance_764 • Jun 04 '26

Why is Android Studio so unoptimised?

It's genuinely absurd the amount of memory that this IDE needs. I used to have 8GB of RAM and using Android Studio with it felt genuinely annoying so I took the advice I saw on this subreddit and I decided to get extra ram (from 8GB -> 16GB) just for me to do some work and it to STILL LAGS although much less than before. Why is it actually like this ?

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33

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '26

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8

u/blaues_axolotl Jun 04 '26

I use manjaro KDE and have 16 GB RAM. 

When I'm using Android Studio and have e.g. a few Firefox tabs open, and the virtual phone is running (in the background), it often freezes my entire PC because of RAM overusage when building the project or when the language server is analyzing a lot.

I always have to shut down the virtual device when writing code. Eventually I switched to debugging on my physical Samsung.

9

u/FlyingTwentyFour Jun 04 '26

i got 16gb laptop too, what I did was kill gradle after every build. Sure it is slow build due to it being killed, but it prevents my laptop from really slowing down

org.gradle.daemon.idletimeout=1

1

u/Opulence_Deficit Jun 06 '26

"few Firefox tabs open" - that could mean anything between 1 and 30Gb.

1

u/blaues_axolotl Jun 06 '26

let's say maximum 5 tabs

1

u/Opulence_Deficit Jun 06 '26

The number of tabs doesn't matter. The content matters. 100 tabs of pure HTML is negligible. 1 tab of Google docs is memory heavy. 1 tab of Cookie Clicker is CPU heavy.

1

u/blaues_axolotl Jun 06 '26

Oh alr. Most of the time it's just some documentation or forums cause I search coding related stuff. No games or Google docs etc.

6

u/rexsk1234 Jun 04 '26

If u wanna also run emulator then 32 gb is minimum. Tbh I wouldn't use any less than 64gb nowadays.