I haven’t found any guidance in the apple docs on how granular core data saves should be.
If I am inside a loop and inserting multiple new objects into core data, how often should I be calling [NSManagedObjectContext save]? Should I be saving in each and every iteration or only once after all the inserts are finished? What if there are 1000 objects to insert?
You should consider the memory footprint vs performance when importing a considerable amount of data.
Take a look at Core Data Programming Guide – Efficiently Importing Data