JTextArea update VERY slow

Question

I have a dialog that a JTabbedPane with several tabs on it. One of the tabs contains a JTextArea that I have redirected System.out to. The JTextArea is attached to a JScrollPane and then to the JTabbedPane. The class I created to send System.out to the JTextArea does a JTextArea.append() to display the information in the JTextArea. I am NOT trying to scroll the JScrollPane to keep the last message displayed or anything like that.
The problem is, when I write a large amount of data (30-50 lines, each line <60 characters) to the JTextArea (with System.out.println()) my application becomes unresponsive and it takes a very long time to display. This is only an issue when I have selected the tab in the JTabbedPane that contains my JTextArea. If I select another tab, writing a large amount of data to System.out has no noticeable affect on my application and it displays very quickly.
Is there a better way to update the JTextArea than to use JTextArea.append()? The append() method seems to invalidate the entire JTextArea for each line or character that is displayed (even when the text is not actually displayed on the screen) and slows things down a lot.

Answer 1

I can't really say that it is that exciting but, here it is
import java.awt.*;
import java.io.*;
import javax.swing.*;
import javax.swing.text.*;
public class GUIStream extends OutputStream {
     private JTextArea               _area     = new JTextArea();
     private JScrollPane               _pane     = new JScrollPane( _area );
     public GUIStream() {
          _pane.setPreferredSize( new Dimension( 450, 125 ) );
          _area.setEditable( false );
     public JComponent getOutput() {
          return _pane;
     public void write( int b ) {
          String out;
          try {
               out = Integer.toString( b );
          catch( Exception e ) {
               return;
          _area.append( out );
          _area.invalidate();
     public void write( byte[] buf ) throws IOException {
          write( buf, 0, buf.length );
     public void write( byte[] buf, int off, int len ) {
          _area.append( new String( buf, off, len ) );
          _area.invalidate();
     public void clear() {
          _area.setText( "" );
}To redirect System.out, i simply did this:
System.setOut( new PrintStream( new BufferedOutputStream( new GUIStream() ), false );To add the Component to a dialog, or whatever, use GUIStream.getOutput().