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High Performance UICollectionViewLayout

High Performance UICollectionViewLayout

In this short talk I am going through my experiences when writing UICollectionViewLayouts that need to run fast with lots of data.

Michael Ochs

July 28, 2016
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Transcript

  1. High-Performant
    UICollectionViewLayout

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  2. The Problem
    • We need to support large documents (10k+ pages)
    • UICollectionViewFlowLayout is slow for certain scenarios
    • Size calculations for each site is a slow task
    • UICollectionViewFlowLayout requires all sizes to be known up front*
    • No later than at render time

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  3. The Problem
    • A flow layout is complex
    • The position of item i can only be calculated when all
    positions up to i-1 are known
    • Once element i is calculated, previous elements might
    need to be changed
    • The size of the collection view can only be calculated
    when the position of item n is known
    2 3
    1
    5 6
    4
    8 9
    7
    11 12
    10
    14 15
    13
    17 18
    16

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  4. The Solution (iOS 8+)
    • Estimated cell sizing
    • All cells after the ones currently on screen are calculated
    with an estimate
    • This works because the collection view size is only needed
    to give the scroll indicator the right position and length
    • Caveats:
    • Once the delegate asks you still need to have the right
    size at hand
    • Often it makes sense to update estimates once you have
    calculated some sizes

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  5. The Solution (iOS 8+)
    • Estimated cell sizing
    • All cells after the ones currently on screen are calculated
    with an estimate
    • This works because the collection view size is only needed
    to give the scroll indicator the right position and length
    • Caveats:
    • Once the delegate asks you still need to have the right
    size at hand
    • Often it makes sense to update estimates once you have
    calculated some sizes
    1 2 3
    4 5 6

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  6. The Solution (iOS 10)
    • Automatic estimated cell sizing
    • Estimate is calculated based on the already known
    item sizes and constantly updated
    • Reduced amortize cost by cell prefetching

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  7. The Solution (iOS 10)
    • Automatic estimated cell sizing
    • Estimate is calculated based on the already known
    item sizes and constantly updated
    • Reduced amortize cost by cell prefetching
    • Caveat:
    • The correct size still needs to be known when the cell
    is configured by the collection view

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  8. Additional Features (iOS 10)
    • UICollectionViewFlowLayout now as automatic estimated cell sizing
    • It constantly reevaluates the estimated size based on the known cells
    • Often much more accurate than just providing a constant estimate
    • UICollectionView has UICollectionViewDataSourcePrefetching
    • Like cell prefetching but for the data source behind it
    • Collection view notifies you when to fetch data (in the background)

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  9. What they don’t tell you
    • UICollectionViewFlowLayout does have a hard time for 10k+ items, no
    matter how much you optimize
    • This problem gets worse the closer you come towards the end
    • It’s a linear problem (at least)
    • They tell you start your custom layouts based on
    UICollectionViewFlowLayout
    • Don’t! Use UICollectionViewLayout
    • There is a s$%t load of caching going on, and chances are pretty good
    that their cache is not in sync with what you cache

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  10. What they don’t tell you
    • When writing your own layout, cache everything
    • After that, cache the things you didn’t cache until now
    • It’s crucial to invalidate as little as possible in your caches
    • UICollectionViewLayoutInvalidationContext is great for that
    • But: You do not need to set every property there
    • Values like CGSizeZero do not mean 0, it really means I don’t know

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  11. What they don’t tell you
    • Don’t invalidate you cache right away, wait for prepareLayout
    • The cycle is as follows:
    • shouldInvalidateLayoutFor...
    • invalidationContextFor...
    • invalidateLayout
    • invalidateLayoutWithContext:
    • prepareLayout

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  12. What they don’t tell you
    • No matter what they tell you, creating a custom collection view layout that
    is performant is…
    • solving mathematical issues
    • not trivial
    • much harder than it looks

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  13. Thank you
    Michael Ochs
    @_mochs
    https://pspdfkit.com/blog/

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