Can I clear the Managed Object Context?

Question

Problem: I am doing a really big import where I parse an XML file. For every 10 parsed managed objects, I want to save the Managed Object Context and get rid of those 10 objects in memory, so that I have never more than 10 objects in memory at a time.

After saving it, how could I clear the context so that all the objects go away from memory?

Answer 1

In a situation like this there are four things to remember to do:

1. Wrap your loop in a NSAutoreleasePool
2. Periodically save the context; then
3. Reset the context with -reset
4. Release and re-create the autorelease pool

This will flush all of the memory being used and clear the context.