UICollectionview Scrolling choppy when loading cells

Question

I have a gallery in my app utilizing a UICollectionView. The cells are approximately 70,70 size. I am using ALAssets from the ALAssetLibrary in the gallery which I have stored in a list.

I am using the usual pattern for populating the cells:

-(UICollectionViewCell*)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView cellForItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{

  mycell = [collectionView dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier:cellIdentifier forIndexPath:indexPath];
  mycell.imageView.image = [[UIImage imageWithCGImage:[alassetList objectAtIndex:indexpath.row] thumbnail]];
  return mycell;
}

My gallery is scrolling choppy. I don't understand why this is. I've tried adding a NSCache to cache the thumbnail images (thinking maybe creating the images was expensive) but this did not help for the performance.

I would expect the UI to be as buttery as the stock app.

I am now suspecting it may be something in the UICollectionViewCell prepareForReuse that may be holding up the dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier method but using instruments I was not able to find this.

Any other thing that may be be causing this? Is there a "faster" way to prepare the UICollectionViewCell or to dequeue them in a faster fashion?

Answer 1

So anybody having scrolling issues should do this

add these 2 lines after your dequeue

cell.layer.shouldRasterize = YES;
cell.layer.rasterizationScale = [UIScreen mainScreen].scale;

Answer 2

I would assume the "choppyness" is coming from the UIImage allocation, not anything with the dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier method. I'd try doing the image allocation on a background thread and see if that makes things a little more buttery.

-(UICollectionViewCell*)collectionView:(UICollectionView *)collectionView cellForItemAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath
{
  mycell = [collectionView dequeueReusableCellWithReuseIdentifier:cellIdentifier forIndexPath:indexPath];

  dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_BACKGROUND, 0), ^(void) {
     // Load image on a non-ui-blocking thread
    UIImage *image = [[UIImage imageWithCGImage:[alassetList objectAtIndex:indexpath.row] thumbnail]];

    dispatch_sync(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^(void) {
        // Assign image back on the main thread
        mycell.imageView.image = image;
    });
  });

  return mycell;
}

More details can be found here: https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Multithreading/Introduction/Introduction.html

Answer 3

Load your images using NSURLConnection's sendAsynchronousRequest:queue:completionHandler:

NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:urlString]];
[NSURLConnection sendAsynchronousRequest:request queue:[NSOperationQueue mainQueue] completionHandler:^(NSURLResponse *response, NSData *data, NSError *error) {
    [cell.imageView setImage:[UIImage imageWithData:data]];
}];

Answer 4

Tick on clip subviews and opaque in attributes inspector and tick off paging enabled.

Answer 5

If anyone is using PhImageManager, turning off synchronous solved the problem. (deliveryMode = .FastFormat can also give additional performance enhancement, but the tradeoff is the thumbnail will be of lower quality)

    let option = PHImageRequestOptions()
    option.deliveryMode = .Opportunistic
    option.synchronous = false
    PHImageManager().requestImageForAsset(phAsset, targetSize: CGSizeMake(2048, 2048), contentMode: .AspectFit, options: option, resultHandler: { (image, objects) in
        self.imageView.image = image!
    })

Answer 6

I had issues with UICollectionView scrolling.

What worked (almost) like a charm for me: I populated the cells with png thumbnails 90x90. I say almost because the first complete scroll is not so smooth, but never crashed anymore...

In my case, the cell size is 90x90.

I had many original png sizes before, and it was very choppy when png original size was greater than ~1000x1000 (many crashes on first scroll).

So I select 90x90 (or the like) on the UICollectionView and display the original pngs (no matter the size). Hope this helps others.

Answer 7

I'll share my experience working with collection views.

Swift 5

If you are running iOS 10+, performance should already be better than what you had on earlier versions of iOS. I highly recommend you watch this WWDC video - What's New in UICollectionView in iOS 10

One really simple thing that improved my performance was just implementing the prefetching delegate. I did literally nothing other than just implement it!

• First make sure your collectionView conforms to the delegate,

  yourCollectionView.prefetchDataSource = self
  

• Then just implement the prefetching delegate,

  extension YourViewController: UICollectionViewDataSourcePrefetching {
      func collectionView(_ collectionView: UICollectionView, prefetchItemsAt indexPaths: [IndexPath]) {
          // You could do further optimizations here.
      }
  }