I've noticed a huge performance hit in our application since JavaFX 8. Appearently it is related to Animation.

Especially the Menu/Popup/ContextMenu become very lazy und unresponsive.

Here's a little sample app to reproduce.

1. Start the app.
2. Resize the window often. This seems to trigger some sort of repaint (?). (Just drag a window corner around wildly)
3. Then click the menu. It takes a few seconds until the menu popups up.
4. Hover the menu items 1-10 with your mouse (back and forth).
=> Notice how lazy the selection changes.

In our application it is even reproducible without resizing the window. I guess there's some other repaint logic, e.g. when a ListView (items) changes.


I've also tested with 8u20 b110. It's also reproducible there.

If there's a workaround, let me know, please.


import javafx.animation.Animation;
import javafx.animation.FadeTransition;
import javafx.application.Application;
import javafx.geometry.Insets;
import javafx.scene.Scene;
import javafx.scene.control.Menu;
import javafx.scene.control.MenuBar;
import javafx.scene.control.MenuItem;
import javafx.scene.layout.VBox;
import javafx.scene.paint.Color;
import javafx.scene.shape.Circle;
import javafx.scene.shape.Shape;
import javafx.stage.Stage;
import javafx.util.Duration;

public class TestApp3 extends Application {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        launch(args);
    }

    @Override
    public void start(final Stage stage) {

        VBox vBox = new VBox();
        vBox.setPadding(new Insets(20, 20, 20, 20));

        MenuBar menuBar = new MenuBar();
        Menu menu = new Menu("Click Me");
        menuBar.getMenus().addAll(menu);
        vBox.getChildren().addAll(menuBar);

        for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
            menu.getItems().add(new MenuItem("Item" + i));
        }

        Shape shape = new Circle(30, Color.ORANGE);
        final FadeTransition fadeTransition = new FadeTransition(Duration.seconds(0.5), shape);
        fadeTransition.setAutoReverse(true);
        fadeTransition.setCycleCount(Animation.INDEFINITE);
        fadeTransition.setFromValue(1);
        fadeTransition.setToValue(0);

        fadeTransition.playFromStart();

        vBox.getChildren().add(shape);
        Scene scene = new Scene(vBox);
        stage.setScene(scene);
        stage.show();
    }
}