Pavel Fatin

In this article I enumerate reasons why typical approach to painting in AWT / Swing can result in substantial visual lags, provide examples that demonstrate the problem and propose methods to significantly reduce the drawing latency.

Despite the focus on Java platform, the key ideas can be extended to most modern operation systems and GUI frameworks.

Contents:

1. Problem statement
2. Typical implementation
3. Asynchronous painting
   3.1. Queue delay
   3.2. Request skip
   3.3. Region extension
   3.4. Component reordering
4. Synchronous painting
   4.1. Component opacity
   4.2. Buffering overhead
   4.3. Showing delay
   4.4. Buffer reuse
5. Active rendering
   5.1. Incremental painting
   5.2. Pipeline flush
6. Summary

All key points are accompanied by short, shelf contained, compilable examples that clearly demonstrate the theoretical concepts in practice. The code is also accessible as a GitHub repository.
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