Why is my mouse lagging when I run this small mouse hook application?

Question

This is a little mouse hook application that I wrote a few years ago and I just was wondering why it makes my mouse lag whenever I run it.

I remember reading somewhere t

Answer 1

You are requesting the mouse position at a very fast rate. Try adding a Thread.sleep(time) in your loop:

while (true){
    j.setText("Current Mouse Location: " + m.printLocation());
    c.setText(String.valueOf(m.getMouseColor()));

    // waiting a few milliseconds
    Thread.sleep(200);
}

Also, it's best practice to reuse objects to avoid reallocation. You could improve your method getMouseColor like this:

// Global var
Robot robot;

MouseLocation() throws AWTException {
    robot = new Robot();
}

public Color getMouseColor() {
    return robot.getPixelColor(x, y);
}

EDIT:

Following the suggestion by @cricket_007, use a timer to avoid using a Thread.sleep in the main thread (and inside a while-loop):

new Timer().schedule(new TimerTask() {

    @Override
    public void run() {
        j.setText("Current Mouse Location: " + m.printLocation());
        c.setText(String.valueOf(m.getMouseColor()));
    }
}, 0, 200); // 200 milliseconds