Poor performance using RMI-proxies with Swing components
- by Patrick
I'm having huge performance issues when I add RMI proxy references to a Java Swing JList-component.
I'm retrieving a list of user Profiles with RMI from a server. The retrieval itself takes just a second or so, so that's acceptable under the circumstances. However, when I try to add these proxies to a JList, with the help of a custom ListModel and a CellRenderer, it takes between 30-60 seconds to add about 180 objects. Since it is a list of users' names, it's preferrable to present them alphabetically.
The biggest performance hit is when I sort the elements as they get added to the ListModel. Since the list will always be sorted, I opted to use the built-in Collections.binarySearch() to find the correct position for the next element to be added, and the comparator uses two methods that are defined by the Profile interface, namely getFirstName() and getLastName().
Is there any way to speed this process up, or am I simply implementing it the wrong way? Or is this a "feature" of RMI? I'd really love to be able to cache some of the data of the remote objects locally, to minimize the remote method calls.
