How can I repaint efficiently when using big custom component in Swing?

Question

I have made a custom component (derived from JComponent) which represents a draggable Bezier-curve.
(looks like a hanging cable, someone might know it from Bender or Cubase)

My problem is: The curve may become really long, let's say from top left to bottom right corners of the desktop.

This makes Swing's repaint functionality inefficient: The area of the curve is perhaps few hundred pixels, but the area of the component (being mostly 'transparent') is millions of pixels big.

My subjection impression is:
The longer the curve, the more flicker I get when dragging it.

I hope I made myself clear about the problem.

Perhaps it would help when I somehow could choose by myself, which regions of the component needs repainting at all.

EDIT:
Such a mess! I'm profiling the application using Netbeans, which helps to find inefficient code normally, but this Swing framework is making hundreds of nested calls! I just can't figure out, what is slow and why.
By the way, disabling super.paint(...) or super.paintComponent(...) doesn't help.

Answer 1

Check out Filthy Rich Clients by Chet Haase and Romain Guy. They address these very optimizations among others along the way to producing responsive and graphically impressive UI.