Automatic UITextField offer from a large database

Question

I am trying to add suggestions for a UITextField. They are displayed as a UITableView under the text box, which displays several entries according to what the user enters (for example, Google Suggest).

The only method I've tried so far is to select from an internal SQLite database. This works, but it is very slow, since the database is really large (about 35,000 records). Every time something is typed, the application freezes for 4 or 5 seconds before new offers appear. Therefore, I assume that this method is not the best.

I thought about displaying everything in NSDictionary, but I'm afraid the table is too big (about 1.5 MB) and the NSDictionary constant will be very expensive in terms of memory.

What do you guys think would be better?

Answer 1

Have you thought to use NSThread to create an array that will be used by a table view? (don't make any UIKit calls through this, though). If you run all this in the main thread, it will be slower, especially since your database is large.

, NSThread, : http://www.xprogress.com/post-36-threading-tutorial-using-nsthread-in-iphone-sdk-objective-c/