Improving JTextPane Performance

After I started benchmarking how much time commands took to complete in Dungeon, I noticed that writing a full world map (a grid of colored ASCII characters) to the screen was reasonably slow. Then I set forth to find the solution to my problem.

Basically, there are two causes for slow JTextPane updates: each insertion triggers a re-rendering of the display and some methods in the DefaultStyledDocument class are synchronized, so there is the overhead of acquiring locks.

I worked on the first issue and was able to reduce the overhead of insertion substantially. I wrote a class that keeps two StyledDocuments: one inactive and one set to the JTextPane the class is responsible for. When text is written to this object, it will update the StyledDocument that is inactive, swap both documents, and then update the now inactive StyledDocument. Why keep two documents? Some insertions are just small increments, that really benefit from not having to rewrite a long passage of text multiple times.

How to make it faster? Instead of running the second document update (the user has already seen the update one because the swap has already taken place) on the same thread, delegate it to a worker thread. Note that this approach will block this object for a while. To keep it simple and avoid premature optimization, I did not even code this multithreaded version. But I am mentioning it here just in case someone (maybe me) needs it in the future.

For reference, the issue related to the post.

Getting the Size of an Object in Python

Recently, I found myself wondering how much memory a Python list I had in my environment was using. So I searched and found the following very handy function for the curious minds or desperate debuggers.

sys.getsizeof(object[, default])

  Return the size of an object in bytes. The object can be any type of
  object. All built-in objects will return correct results, but this does
  not have to hold true for third-party extensions as it is implementation
  specific.

  Only the memory consumption directly attributed to the object is
  accounted for, not the memory consumption of objects it refers to.

  If given, default will be returned if the object does not provide means
  to retrieve the size. Otherwise a TypeError will be raised.

  getsizeof() calls the object's __sizeof__ method and adds an additional
  garbage collector overhead if the object is managed by the garbage
  collector.

Adding a GPG Key Manually

I was trying to install MongoDB 3.0 in my production machine and in order to be able to do that via apt-get I needed to import the MongoDB GPG public key.

It went wrong. It went really wrong.

After a huge delay at

gpg: requesting key 7F0CEB10 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com

I would get

gpg: keyserver timed out
gpg: keyserver receive failed: keyserver error

The first solutions I found on the internet for this problem were modifying other commands to look like mine. So I already had the “best command”.

After some more Googling I found that I could grab the key manually and add it without a request to a server.

So I tried and got the key.

Ran

sudo apt-key add 10gen-gpg-key.asc

And the shell told me

OK

That was it. I decided to post about this so that if you find yourself in a similar scenario (cannot get keys via the command line), you have an idea of how to solve the problem. It also serves as a future reference to me, as StackOverflow didn’t do it this time.

Pushing to a Branch of Different Name

This post is another small git tip. If you ever need to push to a remote branch with a different name than your local branch, use

git push origin local-name:origin-name

So if you want to push your local dev into your origin review you’d do

git push origin dev:review

Conservation of Momentum Exercise

Problem Statement

In a train yard, train cars are rolled down a long hill in order to link them up with other cars as shown. A car of mass 4000. kg starts to roll from rest at the top of a hill 5.0 m high, and inclined at an angle of 5.0° to the horizontal. The coefficient of rolling friction between the train and the track is 0.050. What velocity would the car have if it linked up with 3 identical cars sitting on flat ground at the bottom of the track?

Hint: The equation for rolling friction is just like the one for sliding friction.

Illustration

My Solution

The speed of the car after leaving the hill is equal to

v = sqrt(kinetic_energy * 2 / m)

And its kinetic energy will be equal to the work done on it:

kinetic_energy = F * d

Getting the distance is a matter of simple geometry:

d = csc (5°) * 5 m ~= 57.37 m

The force is a bit more complicated, note that I am using the net force, taking friction into account

F = tan (5°) * 4 * 10^4 N - 0.05 * sec (5°) * 4 * 10^4 N
  = 4 * 10^4 N * (tan (5°) - 0.05 * sec (5°)) ~= 1,492 N

Throwing everything together

v = sqrt(F * d * 2 / m) ~= 6.542 m / s

As the velocity will be equally divided between the cars

v = (6.542 m / s) / 4 = 1.635 m / s

Thus, the answer is 1.64 m / s.

Note that I used 10 m s^-2 for the gravitational acceleration. If you want to be more precise, use 9.80665 m s^-2, the the standard acceleration due to gravity.