Setting image property of UIImageView causes major lag - performance

Question

Let me tell you about the problem I am having and how I tried to solve it. I have a UIScrollView which loads subviews as one scrolls from left to right. Each subview has 10-20 images around 400x200 each. When I scroll from view to view, I experience quite a bit of lag.
After investigating, I discovered that after unloading all the views and trying it again, the lag was gone. I figured that the synchronous caching of the images was the cause of the lag. So I created a subclass of UIImageView which loaded the images asynchronously. The loading code looks like the following (self.dispatchQueue returns a serial dispatch queue).
- (void)loadImageNamed:(NSString *)name {
dispatch_async(self.dispatchQueue, ^{
UIImage *image = [UIImage imageNamed:name];
dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
self.image = image;
});
});
}
However, after changing all of my UIImageViews to this subclass, I still experienced lag (I'm not sure if it was lessened or not). I boiled down the cause of the problem to self.image = image;. Why is this causing so much lag (but only on the first load)?
Please help me. =(

Answer 1

EDIT 3: iOS 15 now offers UIImage.prepareForDisplay(completionHandler:).
image.prepareForDisplay { decodedImage in
imageView.image = decodedImage
}
or
imageView.image = await image.byPreparingForDisplay()
EDIT 2: Here is a Swift version that contains a few improvements. (Untested.)
https://gist.github.com/fumoboy007/d869e66ad0466a9c246d
EDIT: Actually, I believe all that is necessary is the following. (Untested.)
- (void)loadImageNamed:(NSString *)name {
dispatch_async(self.dispatchQueue, ^{
// Determine path to image depending on scale of device's screen,
// fallback to 1x if 2x is not available
NSString *pathTo1xImage = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:name ofType:#"png"];
NSString *pathTo2xImage = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:[name stringByAppendingString:#"#2x"] ofType:#"png"];
NSString *pathToImage = ([UIScreen mainScreen].scale == 1 || !pathTo2xImage) ? pathTo1xImage : pathTo2xImage;
UIImage *image = [[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:pathToImage];
// Decompress image
if (image) {
UIGraphicsBeginImageContextWithOptions(image.size, NO, image.scale);
[image drawAtPoint:CGPointZero];
image = UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext();
UIGraphicsEndImageContext();
}
// Configure the UI with pre-decompressed UIImage
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
self.image = image;
});
});
}
ORIGINAL ANSWER: It turns out that it wasn't self.image = image; directly. The UIImage image loading methods don't decompress and process the image data right away; they do it when the view refreshes its display. So the solution was to go a level lower to Core Graphics and decompress and process the image data myself. The new code looks like the following.
- (void)loadImageNamed:(NSString *)name {
dispatch_async(self.dispatchQueue, ^{
// Determine path to image depending on scale of device's screen,
// fallback to 1x if 2x is not available
NSString *pathTo1xImage = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:name ofType:#"png"];
NSString *pathTo2xImage = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:[name stringByAppendingString:#"#2x"] ofType:#"png"];
NSString *pathToImage = ([UIScreen mainScreen].scale == 1 || !pathTo2xImage) ? pathTo1xImage : pathTo2xImage;
UIImage *uiImage = nil;
if (pathToImage) {
// Load the image
CGDataProviderRef imageDataProvider = CGDataProviderCreateWithFilename([pathToImage fileSystemRepresentation]);
CGImageRef image = CGImageCreateWithPNGDataProvider(imageDataProvider, NULL, NO, kCGRenderingIntentDefault);
// Create a bitmap context from the image's specifications
// (Note: We need to specify kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little
// because PNGs are optimized by Xcode this way.)
CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB();
CGContextRef bitmapContext = CGBitmapContextCreate(NULL, CGImageGetWidth(image), CGImageGetHeight(image), CGImageGetBitsPerComponent(image), CGImageGetWidth(image) * 4, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedFirst | kCGBitmapByteOrder32Little);
// Draw the image into the bitmap context
CGContextDrawImage(bitmapContext, CGRectMake(0, 0, CGImageGetWidth(image), CGImageGetHeight(image)), image);
// Extract the decompressed image
CGImageRef decompressedImage = CGBitmapContextCreateImage(bitmapContext);
// Create a UIImage
uiImage = [[UIImage alloc] initWithCGImage:decompressedImage];
// Release everything
CGImageRelease(decompressedImage);
CGContextRelease(bitmapContext);
CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace);
CGImageRelease(image);
CGDataProviderRelease(imageDataProvider);
}
// Configure the UI with pre-decompressed UIImage
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
self.image = uiImage;
});
});
}

Answer 2

I think, the problem could be Images themselves. For example - I got in one of my projects 10 images 640x600 layered with alpha transparency on each other. When I try to push or pop viewcontroller from this viewcontroller.. it lags a lot.
when I leave only few images or use quite smaller images - no lag.
P.S. tested on sdk 4.2 ios5 iphone 4.