Speed up the response retriever from server in iphone

Question

I am using following code to get results from server

        NSString *queryString = @"MyString"

        NSString *response = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:queryString] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];

        NSLog(@"%@",response);

        if (err != nil)
        {
            UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc]initWithTitle: @"Error"
                                                           message: @"An error has occurred. Kindly check your internet connection"
                                                          delegate: self
                                                 cancelButtonTitle:@"Ok"
                                                 otherButtonTitles:nil];
            [alert show];
            [indicator stopAnimating];
        }
        else
        {
//BLABLA
}

The problem with this code is ,If server shows lag and it takes lets say 3 seconds to get this response

NSString *response = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:queryString] 

For 3 seconds my iPhone screen is jammed. How can i make it run in background so that it won't slow down or jam the mobile

Regards

Answer 1

What you are doing is sending HTTP request from the main thread. that will jam up the UI as you said. You need to spawn a background thread and make a request to your server, when the response comes back then you need to update the UI from the main thread. This is a common pattern in UI coding.

__block__  NSString *response;

dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_HIGH, 0), ^{

    //your server url and request. data comes back in this background thread
    response; = [NSString stringWithContentsOfURL:[NSURL URLWithString:queryString] encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding error:&err];

    dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
        //update main thread here.
        NSLog(@"%@",response);

        if (err != nil)
        {
            UIAlertView *alert = [[UIAlertView alloc]initWithTitle: @"Error"
                                                           message: @"An error has occurred."
                                                          delegate: self
                                                 cancelButtonTitle:@"Ok"
                                                 otherButtonTitles:nil];
            [alert show];
            [indicator stopAnimating];
        }
    });
});

You can also use performSelectorInBackground:withObject: to spawn a new thread, then the performed selector is responsible for setting up the new thread's autorelease pool, run loop and other configuration details – see "Using NSObject to Spawn a Thread" in Apple's Threading Programming Guide.

You'd probably be better off using Grand Central Dispatch as I posted above. GCD is a newer technology, and is more efficient in terms of memory overhead and lines of code.

Answer 2

You could use ASIHTTPRequest which is my favorite for getting and sending information.