Take the 2-minute tour ×

I'm testing a multi-user Android APK that I'm developing. For my test requirements I have to run 4 different emulators with 2 physical devices, total of 6 devices running my APK at the same time. I'm using android X86 emulator running in Virtualbox machines, working good with no issues at all compared with my tablet devices.

My problem is when I try to connect with ADB to more than 2 emulators, Eclipse just can't handle it, all of a sudden my ADB server quits and restart again, sometimes just can't recover . If I connect and disconnect from all emulators and physical devices, mananing always 2 at the same time, everything runs ok, but when I try to connect third, adb crash.

Any pointers on this odd behaviour of ADB?

My development environment its Eclipse Galileo V 3.5.2 R35 with Java SE 1.6.0_26 and Android SDK with platform 2.2

share|improve this question
The same happens to me with just one physical device and one virtual one on the same machine. I think you'd just have to use multiple machines to run it all. Or, if you don't need them all connected to ADB at once, just install and run the app one device at a time. –  notverycreative Jul 30 '11 at 1:02
Are you running the latest SDK and ADT? –  Dan S Jul 30 '11 at 1:21
@Dan, Android SDK Tools, revision 11, version 12 is out now but no updates for ADB, I'll try that one –  ruhalde Jul 30 '11 at 1:27
May be your insufficient memory. –  Dharmendra Jul 30 '11 at 4:29
@Dharmendra, my machine its a quadcore AMD Phenom 3Ghz, with 4gigs memory, you think so?. I'm using 2 gigs of physical memory allocated to emulators in virtual machines. –  ruhalde Jul 30 '11 at 13:05

1 Answer 1

up vote 0 down vote accepted

I've found that what really stabilize things is to ALWAYS have an Android virtual devicer connected to ADB. No matter what you do with other ABD devices connected, ADB hardly crash in this way.

I've tested with 2 physycal devices and 5 Android x86 emulators running in VirtualBox, connected in ADB server together with a virtual device. I could only put 4 devices connected at the same time, more than that crashed server and needs an Eclipse restart to put all things back to work.

In short, keep always an Android virtual device connected to ADB server.

share|improve this answer
Just an update to this, really odd behaviour but Eclipse somewhat merges all Debug messages from different devices connected to ADB server, into a single Logcat, this is really annoying to say the least. How can we track things this way?? –  ruhalde Aug 18 '11 at 14:28

Your Answer


