Question

Can someone briefly explain to me when I would need to use NSCache? I read the documentation and I don’t get it. Like, give me an example of a scenario where NSCache would be useful?
Thanks.

Answer 1

It’s more or less just like a dictionary, with the following additional things (as mentioned by the docs):

The NSCache class incorporates various auto-removal policies, which
ensure that it does not use too much
of the system’s memory. The system
automatically carries out these
policies if memory is needed by other
applications. When invoked, these
policies remove some items from the
cache, minimizing its memory
footprint.

You can add, remove, and query items in the cache from different
threads without having to lock the
cache yourself.

Retrieving something from an NSCache object returns an autoreleased
result.

Unlike an NSMutableDictionary object, a cache does not copy the key
objects that are put into it.

You might use it if your application has lots of data that it needs to work with, but you can’t keep it all in memory. For example, if you had an app that pulled data from an SQL Lite database or a web service, you might store it in an NSCache after looking it up. Then, when you need it again, you can check the cache first and only need to hit the database if it isn’t in the cache. The main advantage in this scenario over using a regular dictionary is that if you put too much stuff in the cache and it starts to fill up memory, it will automatically discard things to free up memory for you.