#enchance

Sketch commission for Anios with their lovely OC Draenei Shaman.

Monday, December 20, 2021, 7:12pm (full listen)

We all faced times when our UITableView didn't scroll as we wanted to. I gathered bellow a simple yet thorough article about what may causes that.

Why is my scroll slow? When you create custom UITableViewCell and you use a combination of UIViews and UIImages, you may cause UIKit to do extra Offscreen rendering.

What is Offscreen rendering:

Simply put, is to generate images using Software process neglegting any Hardware acceleration boost.

Types of Offscreen rendering:

CPU offscreen, using the CPU to generate images:

Using Core Graphics

Anything inside drawRect

GPU offscreen (Blending), the GPU will have to calculate the final image, adds shadow, clips, etc...:

Layers with shouldRasterize

cornerRadios, masks, shadows, edge antialiasing

Offscreen impact on performance:

Offscreen rendering impacts the performance when its getting done on each frame, in scrolling or animation. but if its done and cached, it may enhance performance.

But hey!

We still need to create custom UITableViewCell, fear not the bellow list shows the ways we can achieve that ordered in performance cost.

Customisation methods ordered by performance:

Use resizable image and normal images

Use a combination of opaque, non-transparent UIViews.

Use Hybrid mode: Use CoreGraphics and code to create stretchable images that you will cache/purge

use CALayer only if you need animation

Worst! Draw using CoreGraphics inside drawRect

Major reasons for slow scroll, And their solutions:

Slow cell creation.

Offscreen creation of cell takes too long: to solve this issue simplify the drawRect.

Too complex drawRect function: Cache any result from drawRect and reuse it.

Too complex view hierarchy: Try to flatten the view hierarchy.

Slow cell movements.

offscreen gets called in each cell: Use hybrid mode from above and cache the images.

too many blending operations: Make views opaque and rasterize the layers.

Tips for fast scrolling:

Recycle cells.

Avoid transparent images, views, make them opaque.

Configure the reused cell must be fast.

Always make most of the views opaque, avoid alpha and clearColor.

Don't place views on fractions of pixels x = 34.5, always use ceil or floor on pixels.

When setting images adjust them (Scale, Clip) after download and before setting them, don't let iOS scales them down.

Scrolling images is faster than views, however the difference is very small if views are opaque.

Use shouldRasterize on layer whenever you can since rasters of the layer will be cached and reused, But remember if you enable shouldRasterize on layers that changes their content or sublayer content frequently you will add cause the performance to drop, since iOS will keep rasterising the layer on each change.

Refs:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6731545/when-does-a-view-or-layer-require-offscreen-rendering

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17593524/using-cornerradius-on-a-uiimageview-in-a-uitableviewcell?lq=1

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/33427366406/designing-for-ios-taming-uibutton

http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/36591648724/designing-for-ios-graphics-performance

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10563986/uiimage-with-rounded-corners

http://blogs.captechconsulting.com/blog/john-szumski/performance-tuning-older-ios-devices

Apple Developer Improving Drawing Performance