Question

After testing my app with Instruments I realized that the current CSV parser I use has a huge memory footprint. Does anybody have a recommendation for one with a low memory footprint?

Answer 1

You probably should do this row-by-row, rather than reading the whole file, parsing it, and returning an array with all the rows in it. In any case, the code you linked to produces zillions of temporary objects in a loop, which means it’ll have very high memory overhead.

A quick fix would be to create an NSAutoreleasePool at the lop of the loop, and drain it at the bottom:

while ( ![scanner isAtEnd] ) {        
    NSAutoreleasePool *innerPool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

… bunch of code…

    [innerPool drain];
}

This will wipe out the temporary objects, so your memory usage will be the size of the data, plus an object for each string in the file (roughly 8 bytes * rows * columns)