Why is My Swing Car Animation So Slow When Many Cars are Added?

Swing Animation Running Extremely Slow

Issue: Severe slowdown upon adding multiple JPanel representations of simulated cars within a Swing animation.

Description:

A discrete event simulation involving car arrivals is being implemented using Java Swing. A Car class represents individual vehicles, with relevant attributes such as current position and speed. Upon each scheduled car arrival event, a Car object is added to an ArrayList in the Model class.

In the View class, a separate thread continuously iterates through the ArrayList of Car objects, calling their move() methods and updating their JPanel representations.

Problem:

Initially, the animation of a few cars moving along a road is smooth. However, as the number of cars increases, the animation becomes painfully slow.

Analysis:

The suspected cause of the performance degradation lies in excessive accessing of the ArrayList. Each car's position is updated by calling the move() method, which requires the system to retrieve the object from the ArrayList and then modify its attributes. This repetitive process becomes increasingly inefficient as the number of objects grows.

Solution:

Instead of repeatedly accessing the ArrayList, a data structure that allows for faster lookup and retrieval of objects is recommended. One suitable option could be a HashMap, where each Car object is mapped to a unique key (e.g., its identifier). By using a HashMap, the retrieval of a car's position can be done in constant time (O(1)), regardless of the number of objects in the list. Additionally, periodic garbage collection can be utilized to remove unnecessary objects from the ArrayList and optimize memory usage.

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