Swing component caching?

Date: 30 Jun 2003 02:51:43 -0700
Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.gui
Size: 1,769 bytes

Hi
The software I'm creating defines a number of 'screens' each of which
contains various multimedia components (video, audio, images, text
areas, buttons, etc). The screens and components are created from an
XML descriptor when the software fires up.
I've created classes to represent these components, and their job is
to manage the Swing resources used to render each component (e.g. a
JPanel and ImageIcon for a relatively simple 'image' component). When
a screen is initialised (i.e. displayed), each component creates the
necessary Swing components and adds them to the main full-screen
panel. On a screen change, the components are removed from the screen
and disposed with.
So currently each component dynamically creates (i.e. new) Swing
components each time the screen is visited, and releases them for
garbage collection when the screen is done with.
Now there are several hundred of these screens each containing on
average half-a-dozen components (and therefore generally half-a-dozen
Swing components).
Does anyone think there would be a performance benefit in caching the
Swing components between screens? i.e. maintain a pool of JPanels,
JTextPanes, ImageIcons, mouse listeners, etc. rather than creating
them dynamically.
Obviously I can measure performance now, re-code the various component
classes to use caching, and re-measure to see if it helped or not. But
this would take a good few hours of development work, and I'd like to
see if anyone else has tried anything similar before I start to
bastardise my nice design.
I've worked on the assumption that creating a couple of thousand
(several hundred x half-a-dozen) Swing components up-front would be a
bad idea - but is it?
Any thoughts, experiences, ideas appreciated.
ta
- sarge