Degraded performance on remote Solaris machine vs local machine

Question

Why is performance slow for an application running on a remote server?

Answer

The usual fix for this problem is to set the sun.java2d.pmoffscreen system parameter to false. This can be done either through a JVM parameter:

-Dsun.java2d.pmoffscreen=false

or early during initialization of the program:

System.setProperty("sun.java2d.pmoffscreen", "false");

This flag influences the storage of the Swing double-buffer and other Java Image objects. If the flag is false, they reside in Java memory. If the flag is true, they reside in the X server.

In the 'false' case, drawing with antialiasing or transparency or in XOR mode is fast, but a refresh of the view after it was partially obscured can be a bit slow.

In the 'true' case, refreshing the view from the double-buffer is immediate, but drawing in general is slow, and drawing with antialiasing or transparency or in XOR mode is very slow, especially in the case of a remote display.

For a local display, for normal GUI programming, 'true' is probably the better choice, but for drawing intensive graphics (as with JViews), we recommend 'false'.

For a remote display, 'false' is the right choice, regardless of the type of application.

Since JDK 1.4, the default of this flag is 'true'.

References:

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/2d/flags.html#pmoffscreen