How to download a large file with the iPhone SDK and avoid memory usage issues?

Question

I'm using the NSURLConnection class to download a large file in my iPhone application, but it crashes every so often because it's using too much memory. I'm doing the usual NSURLConnection usage, to append the received data to a NSMutableData object.

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data {
    [self.fileData appendData:data];
}

Then after I finish downloading the whole file, I save it to a local temporary file, and read it as a mapped file like this:

- (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection *)connection {
    // save the downloaded data into a temporary file
    NSString *tempPath = NSTemporaryDirectory();
    NSString *tempFile = [tempPath stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"temp.pdf"];
    [self.fileData writeToFile:tempFile atomically:YES];
    NSData *mappedData = [NSData dataWithContentsOfMappedFile:tempFile];

    NSURL *baseURL = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://mydomain.com"];
    [webView loadData:mappedData MIMEType:@"application/pdf" textEncodingName:@"UTF-8" baseURL:baseURL];
}

What can I improve here to avoid these memory usage problems?

Answer 1

If it's that large, why not write it to the file as it comes in, rather than keeping it in an NSData object?

Answer 2

i'm using

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSData *)data
{
    filename = [[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:save_name];
    NSFileHandle *file1 = [NSFileHandle fileHandleForUpdatingAtPath: filename];
    [file1 writeData: data];
    [file1 closeFile];
}

Answer 3

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveResponse:(NSURLResponse*)response {

    filename = [[NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES) objectAtIndex:0] stringByAppendingPathComponent:save_name]; // filename is in .h file

    [[NSFileManager defaultManager] createFileAtPath:filename contents:nil attributes:nil];
        file =
[[NSFileHandle fileHandleForUpdatingAtPath:filename] retain];// file is in .h 

if (file)   {

        [file seekToEndOfFile];
    }
 }

- (void)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection didReceiveData:(NSD
ata *)data {

 if (file)  { 

        [file seekToEndOfFile];

    } [file writeData:data]; 

}

- (void)connectionDidFinishLoading:(NSURLConnection*)connection { 

[file closeFile]; 

}