iphone app photo upload to server from app threads

Question

I have an app that needs to upload a least 5 photos to a server using API call available with the server. For that I am planning to use threads which will take care of photo upload and the main process can go on with the navigation of views etc. What I cant decide is whether it is OK to spawn five separate threads in iphone or use a single thread that will do the upload. In the later cases obviously it will become quite slow. Basically an HTTP POST request will be made to the server with the NSMutableURLRequest object using NSCOnnection.

More threads mean more complexity and sync issues, but I can try to write code as neat as possible if it means better performance than a single thread which is simple but is a real stopper if performance is considered. Anybody with any experience in this kinda app. ??

Answer 1

I would suggest using one extra thread and queuing the uploads, one after the other. You'll end up clogging the network interfaces if you try 5 uploads concurrently. Remember that the iPhone will often be on a 3G or even EDGE connection, not always WiFi, so photo uploads can be really slow, and even slower if there are 5 at once.

You could probably benefit from using NSOperation and NSOperationQueue to nicely handle the ugly threading for you. Wrap up an upload process into an NSOperation, and then queue 5 of them for each image. Should work quite nicely.

Answer 2

Jasarien thanks for the bit on NSOperation and NSOperationQueue. It did simplyify in great measure. But right now I hve run into a major issue. I spawn an extra thread from the main thread. This thread queues up each of the picture upload operation. So this thread queues up 5 picture opload operations in a queue. This is absolutely fine when working with Mac PC. Now when I push the app to the device, only one pic upload is successful and the rest fails. Most of the cases of failure are due to server time out error. So basically I am wondering, whether NSOperationQueue ensure only one operation at a time or not ? I mean if the first pic upload is in progress and say the next operation is already added in the queue. Would it create an extra thread for the second operation too while the first one is running ? I think as the name suggests, it must wait in the queue until the previous one is done. Not sure how to go abt doing it. I am uploading pic which are taken with iphone camera.