Java DefaultListModel performance issues

Recently I received a big customer escalation on search domain.
Basically end user was searching for enterprise information based on end user input criteria.
In our java rich client, we are showing a simple dialog to select the list of users in the enterprise. This action was consuming 10+ minutes.
Real culprit was UI works fine for simple 100 to 1000 users.
However customer is testing with 10K plus users.
After analyzing the all the code at server side & finally I looked in the client layer.
At client, server data is getting added to DefaultListModel with addElement() in a for loop.
Real culprit is addElement() method.
After seeing the implementation of the above method & its sequence of event calls &
Little bit of browsing the java forums, I found out that we should use the above class for large lists. Yes never use DefaultListModel directly. Still this problem exists in JDK 1.5 version. There are multiple solutions to this problem. Just Google it. You will find many.
I made a quick fix based on some suns forum advice. (Basically it is fast & I am seeing 90% improvement)

Steps:

1) Extend your DefaultListModel as shown below

class FastListModel extends DefaultListModel { private boolean listenersEnabled = true;
public boolean getListenersEnabled() { return listenersEnabled; }
public void setListenersEnabled(boolean enabled) { listenersEnabled = enabled; } public void fireIntervalAdded(Object source, int index0, int index1) { if (getListenersEnabled()) { super.fireIntervalAdded(source, index0, index1); } }
}

2) Add list listener to your list model

ListDataListener listener = new ListDataListener() { public void intervalAdded(ListDataEvent e) { list.ensureIndexIsVisible(e.getIndex1()); } public void intervalRemoved(ListDataEvent e) { } public void contentsChanged(ListDataEvent e) { } }; model.addListDataListener(listener);

3) Turn on & off listener explicitly

model.setListenersEnabled(false);

//add content for(int i = 0; i <>

// now enable the listers

model.setListenersEnabled(true);