Finding performance limits

As I see it, Moore's law tells us that if a research prototype runs fast enough, then you aren't doing it right! I'm expecting that this thing will not run at the speed of a respectable language, at least not on the development platforms I'm using. I've therefore been waiting for my experiments to run into performance limits. I've finally found one, after realising that you can't have nicely antialiased lines if you are going to do affine transforms - for that to work, the transform has to be interpolated. Bicubic interpolation produced nice smooth results on this image (a first stack made of index cards rather than book pages), but runs slowly enough that the page turn animation was already finished before the pages were rendered. An entertaining (not) half-day ensued, as I played with ImageObservers and MediaTrackers in multiple animation threads. At the end of this, I just gave up - I don't think I understand how they work, and index cards don't need to bend anyway.