About a month ago i have introduced the new project named LightBeam that aims to assist look-and-feel writers to measure performance of their libraries under various static and dynamic scenarios. I have used this tool extensively during the performance optimizations of the next release of Substance look-and-feel, and it has now reached its first official release 1.0 code-named Antares.

The project distribution contains sample script files to test static and dynamic scenarios under the core look-and-feels (Metal, Windows and Nimbus), as well as a selection of active third-party look-and-feels (Substance, Looks and Synthetica). The performance spreadsheet available for download contains the breakdown of different scenarios, and here is the “executive summary” for the dynamic scenarios that try to emulate most common user interaction flows:

• 3,039 ms – Metal
• 3,721 ms – Windows
• 4,004 ms – Looks Plastic XP
• 4,696 ms – Nimbus
• 4,794 ms – Substance Autumn 5.0dev
• 4,908 ms – Synthetica default
• 13,146 ms – Substance Autumn 4.3

All the numbers are taken on my main development machine running the latest b26 of 6u10.