Laggy interface with NSSearchField hooked up to an NSArrayController via bindings

Question

So I've got an NSSearchField hooked up directly to an NSArrayController via bindings, attached to the filterPredicate, so that without any code, the user can just type in the NSSearchField and filter the list of objects in the NSArrayController presented to him in the interface (an NSCollectionView, to be specific).

The NSSearchField is hooked up to provide live searching, so that the NSCollectionView is filtered instantly as the user types, not after waiting for a short period for the user to stop typing.

However, the problem is that this makes the interface really laggy. Typing is delayed significantly, by 0.5-1 seconds, and it seems like the NSCollectionView is trying to animate each and every rearrangement of items for each portion of the search string that the user enters.

What I'd like is for the searching to be live, but the typing in the search field to be fluid, and the results to filter as fast as possible. Is there a way to do this via bindings, or will I need to put in some custom code that triggers the filterPredicate on a separate thread?

(Note that I've got a custom sorting algorithm set up on the NSArrayController, and removing it seems to help a bit with the laggyness, but not completely.)

Answer 1

I would definitely go with the predicate on the separate thread. It seems you know what you have to do. Obviously blocking on the current thread is the lag issue.

Answer 2

Actually, it looks like you can't call setFilterPredicate: from a separate thread. It causes a crash.

It turns out that my problem was actually caused by some slow code being called over and over when setting the filter predicate, which severely slowed down the performance of the filtering. I found this by using a Time Profiler tool in Instruments on my app. That showed me which method was taking the most time, and optimizing that method fixed the lagginess issue.