How Does Caching Work in AFNetworking? : AFImageCache & NSUrlCache Explained
FEB 20TH, 2014
If you are an iOS developer using Mattt Thompson’s ‘delightful networking framework’ AFNetworking
(and
if you aren’t, what are you waiting for?), perhaps you have been been curious or confused about the caching mechanism employed and how you can tweak it to your advantage.
AFNetworking
actually
takes advantage of 2 separate caching mechanisms:
- AFImagecache: a memory-only image
cache private toAFNetworking
,
subclassed off ofNSCache
- NSURLCache:
NSURLConnection's
default
URL caching mechanism, used to storeNSURLResponse
objects
: an in-memory cache by default, configurable as an on-disk
persistent cache
In order to understand how each caching system works, let’s look at how they are defined:
How AFImageCache Works
AFImageCache
is
a part of the UIImageView+AFNetworking
category.
It is a subclass of NSCache
,
storing UIImage
objects
with a URL string as its key (obtained from an input NSURLRequest
object).
AFImageCache
definition:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 |
|
AFImageCache
is
a private implementation of NSCache
.
There is no customization that you can do outside of editing the implementation in the the UIImageView+AFNetworking
category,
directly. It stores all accessed UIImage
objects
into its NSCache. The NSCache
controls
when the UIImage
objects
are released. If you wish to observe when images are released, you can implement NSCacheDelegate
’s cache:willEvictObject
method.
Edit (03.14.14) : Mattt Thompson has gratiously informed me that as of AFNetworking
2.1, AFImageCache
is
configurable. There is now a public setSharedImageCache method.
Here’s the full AFN 2.2.1 UIImageView+AFNetworking
specification.
How NSURLCache Works
Since AFNetworking
uses NSURLConnection
,
it takes advantage of its native caching mechanism, NSURLCache
. NSURLCache
caches NSURLResponse
objects
returned by server calls via NSURLConnection
.
Enabled by Default, but Needs a Hand
An NSURLCache
sharedCache
is
enabled by default and will be used by any NSURLConnection
objects
fetching URL contents for you.
Unfortunately, it has a tendency to hog memory and does not write to disk in its default configuration. To tame the beast and potentially add some persistance, you can simply declare a shared NSURLCache
in
your app delegate like so:
1 2 3 4 |
|
Here we declare a shared NSURLCache
with
2mb of memory and 100mb of disk space
Setting the Cache Policy on NSURLRequest Objects
NSURLCache
will
respect the caching policy (NSURLRequestCachePolicy
)
of each NSURLRequest
object.
The policies are defined as follows :
- NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy: specifies that the caching logic defined in the protocol
implementation, if any, is used for a particular URL load request. This is the default policy for URL load requests - NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringLocalCacheData: ignore the local cache, reload from source
- NSURLRequestReloadIgnoringLocalAndRemoteCacheData: ignore local & remote caches, reload from
source - NSURLRequestReturnCacheDataElseLoad: load from cache, else go to source.
- NSURLRequestReturnCacheDataDontLoad: offline mode, load cache data regardless of expiration,
do not go to source - NSURLRequestReloadRevalidatingCacheData: existing cache data may be used provided the origin
source confirms its validity, otherwise the URL is loaded from the origin source.
Caching to Disk with NSURLCache
Cache-Control HTTP Header
Either the Cache-Control
header
or the Expires
header
MUST be in the HTTP response header from the server in order for the client to cache it (with the existence of the Cache-Control
header
taking precedence over the Expires
header).
This is a huge gotcha to watch out for. Cache
can have parameters defined such as
Controlmax-age
(how
long to cache before updating response), public / private access, or no-cache
(don’t
cache response). Here
is
a good introduction to HTTP cache headers.
Subclass NSURLCache for Ultimate Control
If you would like to bypass the requirement for a Cache-Control
HTTP
header and want to define your own rules for writing and reading the NSURLCache
given
an NSURLResponse
object,
you can subclass NSURLCache
.
Here is an example that uses a CACHE_EXPIRES
value
to judge how long to hold on to the cached response before going back to the source:
(Thanks to Mattt Thompson for the feedback and code edits!)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 |
|
Now that you have your NSURLCache
subclass,
don’t forget to initialize it in your AppDelegate in order to use it :
1 2 3 4 |
|
Overriding the NSURLResponse before caching
The -connection:willCacheResponse
delegate
is a place to intercept and edit the NSURLCachedResponse
object
created by NSURLConnection
before
it is cached. In order to edit the NSURLCachedResponse
,
return an edited mutable copy as follows (code from NSHipster blog):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 |
|
Disabling NSURLCache
Don’t want to use the NSURLCache
?
Not Impressed? That’s okay. To disable the NSURLCache
,
simply zero out memory and disk space in the shared NSURLCache
definition
in your appDelegate:
1 2 3 4 |
|
Summary
I wanted to write this blog post for the benefit of the iOS community, to summarize all of the information I found dealing with caching releated to AFNetworking
.
We had an internal app loading a lot of images that had some memory issues and performance problems. I was tasked with trying to diagnose the caching behavior of the app. During this exercise, I discovered the information on this post through scouring the
web and doing plenty of debugging and logging. It is my hope that this post summarizes my findings and provides an opportunity for others with AFNetworking
experience
to add additional information. I hope that you have found this helpful.