iOS image caching. Libraries benchmark (SDWebImage vs FastImageCache)

1. Introduction

In the past years, iOS apps have become more and more visually appealing. Displaying images is a key part of that, that’s why most of them use images that need to be downloaded and rendered. Most developers have faced the need to populate table views or collection views with images. Downloading the images is resource consuming (cellular data, battery, CPU, …), so in order to minimize this the caching model appeared.

To achieve a great user experience, it’s important to understand what is going on under the iOS hood when we cache and load images.

Also, the benchmarks on the most used image caching open source libraries can be of great help when choosing your solution.