Recently I was doing some performance stress testing on my upcoming iPhone app, Newsprint, and ran into a little Core Data gotcha that I thought I would document for both myself and for Google to index for others.
Special thanks to Jeff LaMarche for guiding me in the right direction to figure this out. You can find his blog at: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/
This issue came to play when I needed to do a fetch request from Core Data and then run a couple of Predicate “searches”/”filtering” on the data.
My original thought was that doing a single fetch request and then running my different predicates on the returned set of objects would have better performance then doing multiple fetch requests since I would only have to pull from the Core Data SQLite DB once and then I would have everything in memory and I could just simply manipulate it.
Turns out that this is HIGHLY incorrect.
If instead you just do multiple fetch requests and implement your predicate into your fetch request, that Core Data and SQLite are smart enough to scan the records more efficiently and without causing Core Data Faults to fire.
This gives a MASSIVE speed increase!
So if you are ever doing something similar, make sure to check this method and see if it to can speed your app up.
