LightBeam – measuring performance of Swing look-and-feels

June 17th, 2008 | 6 Comments »

About a month ago i have introduced the new project named LightBeam that aims to assist look-and-feel writers to measure performance of their libraries under various static and dynamic scenarios. I have used this tool extensively during the performance optimizations of the next release of Substance look-and-feel, and it has now reached its first official release 1.0 code-named Antares.

The project distribution contains sample script files to test static and dynamic scenarios under the core look-and-feels (Metal, Windows and Nimbus), as well as a selection of active third-party look-and-feels (Substance, Looks and Synthetica). The performance spreadsheet available for download contains the breakdown of different scenarios, and here is the “executive summary” for the dynamic scenarios that try to emulate most common user interaction flows:

  • 3,039 ms – Metal
  • 3,721 ms – Windows
  • 4,004 ms – Looks Plastic XP
  • 4,696 ms – Nimbus
  • 4,794 ms – Substance Autumn 5.0dev
  • 4,908 ms – Synthetica default
  • 13,146 ms – Substance Autumn 4.3

All the numbers are taken on my main development machine running the latest b26 of 6u10.

Related posts:

  1. Using LightBeam to measure XRender performance Project LightBeam was created a few months ago to assist Swing look-and-feel developers to reliably...
  2. Performance comparison of Substance skins As a follow up to the previous post that showed how LightBeam tool can be...
  3. Performance improvements in Substance 5 Looking at the comments on the announcement of release 4.3 of Substance look-and-feel, the three...
  4. Performance improvements in Substance 5, part 2 The biggest pain point of Substance users, as expressed in the comments on the announcement...

6 Comments on “LightBeam – measuring performance of Swing look-and-feels”

  1. 1 Maxim said at 12:31 am on June 18th, 2008:

    Hi Kirill,

    Interesting comparison. Unfortunately I can’t open xlsx. Could you please publish the performance spreadsheet in some more wide usable format like PDF?

    Thanks,
    Maxim

  2. 2 Thierry Janaudy said at 1:11 am on June 18th, 2008:

    Hello,

    This is great. I am right in reading this: Substance 5 is 3 times faster than version 4?

  3. 3 Andrew McVeigh said at 7:43 am on June 18th, 2008:

    any chance of measuring jtattoo and synthetica?

    Cheers,
    Andrew

  4. 4 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 9:50 am on June 18th, 2008:

    Maxim – i’ve changed the link to PDF format.

    Thierry – yes, Substance 5.0dev is about 2.5-3.5 faster than the previous release. I’ve written about Java2D techniques that i used for tuning the performance.

    Andrew – Synthetica is already on the list. JTattoo Aero is 3,494 ms.

    Thanks
    Kirill

  5. 5 Luke Sleeman said at 6:08 pm on June 18th, 2008:

    This is great! One thing we noticed with substance is the skin you were using has a dramatic effect on the speed. Things like watermarks and button shapers in particular had a big effect. Do you have any numbers comparing different substance themes? Under version 5 is there still much of a difference between different themes?

  6. 6 Kirill Grouchnikov said at 8:43 pm on June 18th, 2008:

    Luke – you beat me to the follow-up post :) Please see the next post for the numbers for different core Substance skins.