Real-Time Charts

Real-Time Charts VS JFreeChart:

JFreeCharts are great for creating any kind of static graphs (typically for reports). They provide support for all types of existing chart types. The benefit of using JFreeChart is fully customizable appearance and export to various formats. The only problem of this library is that it's not primarily designed for displaying live data. You can hack it to display data in real time, but the performance is poor.

That's why I've created the VisualVM charts. The primary (and so far only) goal is to provide charts optimized for displaying live data with minimal performance and memory overhead. You can easily display a fullscreen graph and it will still scroll smoothly while running and adding new values (when running on physical hardware, virtualized environment may give slightly worse results). There's a real rendering engine behind the charts which ensures that only the changed areas of the chart are repainted (no full-repaints because of a 1px change). Scrolling the chart means moving the already rendered image and only painting the newly displayed area. Last but not least, the charts are optimized for displaying over a remote X session - rendering is automatically switched to low-quality ensuring good response times and interactivity.

The Tracer engine introduced in VisualVM 1.3 further improves performance of the charts. I've intensively profiled and optimized the charts to minimize the cpu cycles/memory allocations for each repaint. As of now, I believe that the VisualVM charts are the fastest real time Java charts with the lowest cpu/memory footprint.

http://java.dzone.com/news/real-time-charts-java-desktop