On iOS, its well documented that the UI should never be updated from a background thread. Rather the main thread should be the sole interface to update the UI. My Question is why?
Is it because UIControls are not thread safe and hence there is always the possibility of main thread updating the particular control whilst its being tinkered with in a background thread? Is my understanding right?
Thanks
I think it has more to do with keeping the UI responsive, so iOS just prevents you from putting UI stuff in threads that aren't main.
You know you can use dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ) { //change UI here } from within a background thread to send your UI actions to the main thread.
Related
I am facing the crash
Modifications to the layout engine must not be performed from a background thread after it has been accessed from the main thread.
I referred to the crash and added the line self.Indicator.stopAnimating() in my code. It runs fine for one or two tests, and it shows the same crash again.
All the UI handling must be done on the main thread instead of the background thread. That's what the crash says.
So move your UI specific code to DispatchQueue.main.async, i.e.
DispatchQueue.main.async {
self?.Indicator.stopAnimating()
}
That stands for all the UI specific changes. Move them to main thread.
Unrelated: use camel-casing for variable names. It must be indicator instead of Indicator.
I have shown an UIAlertView from a thread, but the UI hangs and then shows UIAlertView after 2-3 seconds.
I can use dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue... or performSelectorOnMainThread to fix this.
I want to know why the UI hangs when we present any UIAlertView on background thread.
On iOS, all UI operations have to performed on the main thread, you can't have UI operations (such as showing an UIAlertView) on a background thread. That's also the explanation why performSelectorOnMainThread: fixes the issue.
Here is a nice blog post on the topic and a link to the docs.
I have an iOS application that has an NSTimer which fires every 5 seconds. This then posts a notification, telling several controllers that they must now recalculate some data and then update their UI.
When this all happens on the main thread, scrollviews can become jittery as the data is processed.
Using GCD, I have wrapped the code called when a notification is posted:
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(DISPATCH_QUEUE_PRIORITY_DEFAULT, 0), ^{
// Code here
dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^(){
// Reload tableviews and UI
};
};
Unfortunately, this leads in certain cases to several threads accessing the same instance variables. This causes my application to crash as sometimes it ends up mutating an array being enumerated in another thread.
Wrapping the code in a synchronised block prevents this.
When the user scrolls the tableview, several methods are called to calculate the height etc, on the main thread. The code within the background thread is working on the code needed by the main thread. As such, this can usually further cause crashes
I have tried setting the variables to 'atomic', but this doesn't solve the issue. Ideally, I don't want to have the main thread waiting on the background thread, but I am not sure how to best resolve this issue given that they need the same data?
This is pretty classic multithreaded programming issues. There are a number of ways to solve it with basic locks (#synchronized blocks), reader/writer locks, etc but the problem is often that you can't control when the user is going to scroll or take other action. If you #synchronize, you have to do it anywhere that data is touched, including your UITableView data source methods. That can lead to stuttering if the background processing happens to be in the middle of something.**
Personally, I would use an immutable snapshot mechanism.
Have the background thread produce the results, then include just the data the UI needs to display in the notification data as an immutable snapshot (copy). That way the background thread never modifies the data the UI is currently reading for display. How you would implement this is highly dependent on how much data you are talking about and the form it takes, but the safe way would be to have copies of your classes with readonly properties. Alternatively, you can use a "frozen" flag. Make a copy, then set frozen = YES on the copy. The UI thread will only ever see "frozen" or readonly objects coming from the background thread.
The benefit is the UI never causes the background thread to stall and there are no locks required. The downside is increased memory usage, though if the amount of data is large you can use copy-on-write mechanisms to allow the background thread and UI thread to share the data, even though logically the UI thread has a completely separate copy.
** Note: In most applications, you don't have this sort of continuous background processing going on so those apps can use simpler mechanisms. This is typically a form of message passing where the background thread finishes its task and "passes the message" to the UI thread (passes the results). At that point the background work is finished so there is no concurrent modification happening.
I am doing one application in which i got one HTML string in background thread. I want to load the webview using that HTML string in background.
If I load that web view on background, the app crashes. I don't want to load webview using main thread because on that i don't want to disturb the main thread. And i did the R&D in internet i got one possibility using GCD.I think that one also involved in main thread. SO please let me know how to update the UI in background.
You can not. UI must always be updated from the main thread. Whatever your reason for not wanting to do it from the main thread, that reason is invalid.
No. You cant update UI in other thread then main.
A UIViewController takes about half a second to load its contents and appear on screen. How can I make them all load in the background and appear when they're ready?
There is a LazyTableImages sample on the Apple developer site.
It shows how to perform the heavy lifting in a background thread and update the UI on the main thread.
PerformSelectorInBackground:withObject: is a possible solution, although a more modern method would be to use asynchronous blocks. You can run code on the main thread from within these blocks to update the UI Safely.
The Concurrency Programming Guide is a good place to find more information and examples of this.
A Background Thread cant update the UI,you can perform all the processing logic in background thread and call the main thread for UI update
Example to load a tableView with Data ,use the background thread to process everything and load the Data, call [tableView reloadData] using the main thread, see Grand central Dispatching to know how to Work with Threads in IOS..
Hope it Helps
Create a GCD queue to process your work in a background thread (read the docs, because my "create" label and options may not be what you want).
You send it to the queue asynchronously, meaning that the call to dispatch_async will make appropriate arrangements for the block of code you give it to run in another thread and it will then return back to you "immediately."
All the work in the block you give it will be executed on a separate thread. Note, at the end, you do another call, this time with the well know main queue. This arranges for that code to run in the main thread, which is mandatory for any UI work.
Also, you really should read the documentation on GCD and especially blocks, because there are memory and cycle considerations. Good luck.
dispatch_queue_t workQ = dispatch_queue_create("bgWorkQ", 0);
dispatch_async(workQ, ^{
// This code is now running in a background thread.
// Do all your loading here...
// When ready to touch the UI, you must do that in the main thread...
disptach_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
// Now, this code is running in the main thread.
// Update your UI...
});
});
dispatch_release(workQ);
The easiest way is to use NSObject's - (void)performSelectorInBackground:(SEL)aSelector withObject:(id)arg You just pass it a selector and it will happy in the background and not block your UI. Be aware however that there are rules to background threads.
You shouldn't update your UI from the background thread. And you need to make sure the methods you're calling are thread safe.