Core Data and poor performance

Question

I've been working this issue for a while now and I am open to any best practices/advice.

The Example

So I created a sample Core Data application. The application is basically a mimic of the AddressBook application. I have the following Entities: Group, Contact, Address, Phone, Email, Webpage, Dates.

As you probably are guessing, a Group can have multiple Contacts, and a Contact can be in multiple groups. Contacts can also have multiple Addresses, Phones, Emails, Webpages, and Dates.

I basically imported some 600 contacts into this application from AddressBook. The user-interface is relatively simple...a Group/category list on the left and an NSCollectionView or NSTableView on the right that shows the list of contacts depending on the selected Group.(collection view or table view...as I added the ability to display either view, both of which are bound to an NSArrayController)

The Group elements I am pulling in through code as opposed to Interface Builder, becasue I wanted to playaround with a Thing's - like sidebar, and it was far easier to do it this way.

The Problem

One of the categories contains all of the contacts while the other category contains merely 2 contacts. When i select the category that has all the contacts it takes anywhere from 8-10 seconds for the information to populate the collection or tableview. However doing the same thing in AddressBook itself is very speedy, almost instant. I am using the SQLLite store type, and have tried using a number of different approaches including trying to diagnose the problem via Instruments, but nothing has worked.

I've tried setting a predicate to the defaultFetchPredicate of the Contact's array controller as opposed to setting a filter predicate, but that didn't work.

I tried preFetching and faulting but i'm not sure if I'm doing it right, and not really sure how to accomplish it if Interface Builder handles the Contact's NSArrayController.

The Other Example

I've also tried downloading a sample Core Data app...while it has a simpler relationship model than what I did(basically a Molecule has Atom objects and an Atom object has Element objects), I inserted 65,000 records and it performed like a charm.

The Question

I've basically hit a wall and I'm wondering if anyone else knows why this is happening and the best ways to fix/overcome/avoid this type of issue?

Thanks!

Answer 1

It turns out that it was actually the NSCollectionView that was slowing things down. I guess the creation and manipulation of views x number of collection view views adds a significant amount of overhead. IKImageBrowserView could have been used but it wasn't what I was looking for.

I ended up changing the application layout to solve this issue.

Thanks all!