Poor performance using RMI-proxies with Swing components

Question

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.

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Update and possible solution: I created local classes that implements the remote interfaces and contains a reference to the remote objects. The speed enhancement is noticeable and it now works seemlessly (at least so far). I hope this works equally as well for the other interfaces we use in our application. Thanks for the input that I think helped guide me.

Answer 1

I think that you need to add the display fields to your Profile object and return them with the profile. Its fine to bring back the entire Profile in a single inspector view, but if you have them in an overview view you should bring them back in the initial query.

Answer 2

(a) It has nothing to do with RMI.

(b) Faffing around with binarySearch() is just wasting time. Sort the items first, or last, with Collections.sort(), or base your TreeModel on an intrinsically sorted collection.

Answer 3

Patrick, are you calling Collections.binarySearch on Remote objects? It may be that you are inadvertantly causing a huge amount of traffic across the network if this method has to ask the rmi server for further information about the objects.