Remote X Performance

(1) The reality

JDK 1.2 and 1.3 suffer from performance issues when using Remote X for display. However, there are some relatively easy tweaks that will improve remote X performance and can make the difference between unacceptable and pokey-but-usable Swing performance in a Remote X environment.

(2) What to do:

• If you aren't running J2SE 1.3 or later then upgrade. (J2SE 1.3 has some Java2D and Swing fixes that are required to make the rest of this work.)
• Turn off Swing's built-in double-buffering. This allows for more efficient communication between the client and server. To turn off Swing double-buffering, add this line of code to your app before you create any Swing components:

  RepaintManager.currentManager(null).setDoubleBufferingEnabled(false);
  

• If you're using JScrollPane, you also need to make the following addition after you create any scrollpane. This disables some similar JScrollPane specific code:

  scroller.getViewport().setScrollMode(JViewport.SIMPLE_SCROLL_MODE);
  

  This combination won't get performance quite as good as 1.1, but it's a heck of a lot better than 1.2 or 1.2.2.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Double-buffering and the fancier scroll mode improve performance when running locally - its only when running in a Remote X situation that they have the reverse effect. Thus these tweaks will actually hurt performance in the local case. If you have to run in both local and remote environments you will want to have a command line argument to switch these tweaks on and off.