iOS App performance - Things to take care

1. iOS App Performance
Things to Take Care
Gurpreet Singh Sachdeva
Engineering Manager @ Yahoo

2. Who should attend this session?
• If you are developing or planning to develop
iOS apps and looking for tips to make your
apps fast then you are right place.
• Pre-requisite: Basic Objective-C knowledge

3. Why performance is important?
• Faster apps provide a better user experience
• Users expect high performance
• If your app is slow or unresponsive it is bound
to get bad reviews and loose user base.
• Remember, mobile devices have less RAM.

4. Performance Tips
• Use ARC
• In addition to helping you avoid memory leaks, ARC can
also improve your performance, by making sure that
objects are de-allocated as soon as they are no longer
needed.
• These days, you should always use ARC in your projects!

5. Performance Tips
• Don’t block the main thread
• You should never do any heavy lifting on the main
thread. Remember, UIKit does all of its work on the
main thread, such as drawing, managing touches, and
responding to input.
• Most cases of blocking the main thread occur when your
app is performing an I/O operation which involves any
task that needs to read or write from an external
source, such as the disk or the network.
• You can perform network tasks asynchronously by using
this method on NSURLConnection

6. Performance Tips
• Use a reuseIdentifier where appropriate
• A table view’s data source should generally reuse
UITableViewCell objects when it assigns cells to rows.
• Otherwise, table view will configure new cell each time
a row is displayed. This is an expensive operation and
will affect the scrolling performance of your app
• To use reuseIdentifiers, call this method from your data
source object when asked to provide a new cell for the
table view:
static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"Cell";
UITableViewCell *cell = [tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier forIndexPath:indexPath];

7. Performance Tips
• Avoid fat XIBs
• If you are still using XIB files for some reason (may be for
supporting pre iOS 5 devices) then make them as
uncomplicated as possible.
• Note that when you load a XIB into memory, all of its
contents are loaded into memory, including any images.
• If you have a view you’re not using immediately, then you’re
wasting precious memory.
• It’s worth noting that this won’t happen with storyboards,
since a storyboard will only instantiate a view controller when
it’s needed.

8. Performance Tips
• Size images to Image Views
• Scaling images on the fly can be expensive, especially if
your UIImageView is embedded in a UIScrollView.
• If the image is downloaded from a remote service,
sometimes you don’t have control over the size, or you
might not be able to scale it on the server prior to
downloading.

9. Performance Tips
• Choose the correct Collection
• Learning to use the most appropriate class or object for
the task at hand is fundamental to writing efficient
code. This is especially true when dealing with
collections.
• There is a document on Apple’s Developer Library that
explains in detail the differences between the available
classes, as well as which situations suit each class. It’s a
must read document for anyone looking to work with
collections.

10. Performance Tips
• Enable GZIP compression
• Speed up the download of network-based resources by
enabling GZIP compression on both your server and on
your client.
• The good news is that iOS already supports GZIP
compression by default if you’re using
NSURLConnection, or a framework built on top of it such
as AFNetworking.
• There is a great article about GZIP compression which
explains how to enable it on your Apache or IIS server.

11. Performance Tips
• Reuse and lazy Load Views
• Create your views as you need them.
• More views means more drawing; which ultimately
means more CPU and memory overhead. This is
especially true if your app embeds many views inside of
a UIScrollView.

12. Performance Tips
• Cache what matters
• Cache things that are unlikely to change, but are
accessed frequently.
• What can you cache?
• Some candidates for caching are remote server responses,
images.
• NSURLConnection already caches resources on disk or in
memory according to the HTTP headers it processes.

13. Performance Tips
• Handle memory warnings
• iOS notifies all running apps when system memory is
running low.
• UIKit provides several ways to receive these low-memory
warnings, including the following:
• Implement the applicationDidReceiveMemoryWarning: method of your
app delegate.
• Override didReceiveMemoryWarning in your custom UIViewController
subclass.
• Register to receive the
UIApplicationDidReceiveMemoryWarningNotification notification.
• Upon receiving any of these warnings, free up any unnecessary
memory.
• Purge unused data structures, release any images that are not
currently on-screen.

14. Performance Tips
• Reuse expensive Objects
• Some objects are very slow to initialize —
NSDateFormatter and NSCalendar are two examples.
• To avoid performance bottlenecks when working with
these objects, try to reuse these objects if at all possible.
• You can do this by either adding a property to your class or
using static

15. Performance Tips
• Optimize Your Table Views
• Tips for optimizing Table Views
• Reuse cells by setting the correct reuseIdentifier.
• Make as many views opaque as possible, including the cell
itself.
• Avoid gradients, image scaling.
• If the cell shows content that comes from the web, be sure to
make those calls asynchronously and cache the responses.
• Reduce the number of subviews.
• Do as little work as possible in cellForRowAtIndexPath:. If you
need to do some work, do it only once and cache the results.
• Use the appropriate data structure to hold the information you
need. Different structures have different costs for different
operations.

16. Performance Tips
• Speed up launch time
• Launching your app quickly is very important, especially
when the user launches for the first time. First
impressions mean a lot for an app!
• Ensure your app starts as quickly as possible is to
perform asynchronous tasks.
• You need to strike a balance between what to fetch before app
launch and what to fetch once the app is launched.
• Try to avoid fat XIBs, since they’re loaded on the main
thread. But recall that storyboards don’t have this
problem — so use them if you can!

17. Performance Tips
• Cache Images (when?)
• There are two common ways to load a UIImage from an
app bundle.
• Using imageNamed and second using
imageWithContentsOfFile.
• imageNamed has the advantage of caching the image as it’s loaded.
• Alternately, imageWithContentsOfFile simply loads the image with no
caching.
• When would you use one over the other?
• If you’re loading a large image that will be used only once,
there’s no need to cache the image.
• However, imageNamed is a much better choice for images that
you’re going to be reusing in your app.

18. Performance Tips
• Reduce battery consumption
• Optimize use of the following features:
• The CPU
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and baseband (EDGE, 3G) radios
• The Core Location framework
• The accelerometers
• The disk
• Consider the following guidelines:
• Avoid doing work that requires polling.
• Avoid accessing the disk too frequently.
• Do not draw to the screen faster than is needed.
• Connect to external network servers only when needed, and do
not poll those servers.
• Disable location updates as soon as you can.

19. Performance Tips
• Reduce App’s memory footprint
• Actions to take
• Eliminate memory leaks.
• Make resource files as small as possible.
• Use Core Data or SQLite for large data sets.
• Load resources lazily.

20. Performance Tips
• Use NSLog as sparingly as possible in production
• Messages written using NSLog are presented in the
debugger console and even to the device's console log
in production.
• NSLog() takes a non-negligible amount of time.
• The following are commonly used log definitions that
are used to selectively perform NSLog() in
debug/production:
#ifdef DEBUG
// Only log when attached to the debugger
# define DLog(...) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__)
#else
# define DLog(...) /* */
#endif
// Always log, even in production
#define ALog(...) NSLog(__VA_ARGS__)

21. Performance Tips
• Be Lazy
• Defer memory allocations until you actually need the
memory.
• Defer reading the contents of a file until you actually
need the information.

22. Performance Tips
• Take Advantage of Perceived Performance
• The perception of performance is just as effective as
actual performance in many cases.
• Many program tasks can be performed in the
background, using a dispatch queue, or at idle time.
• Doing this keeps the application’s main thread free to handle
user interactions and makes the program interface feel more
responsive to the user.
• If your program needs to scan a number of files or perform
lengthy calculations, do so using a dispatch queue.
• There is a good document available on apple’s site for
Concurrency Programing

23. Analyzing the performance
• Using apple tools for analyzing performance
• https
://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Performance/
Conceptual/PerformanceOverview/PerformanceTools/Performanc
eTools.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40001410-CH205-BCIIHAAJ

24. References
Marcelo Fabri - 25 iOS App Performance Tips & Tricks. Retrieved from
http://www.raywenderlich.com/31166/25-ios-app-performance-tips-tricks