MKAnnotationView UIView or UIImage

Question

I have a map with many (>500) custom annotation views. Currently I am using a UIView that implements the drawRect: method which then draws the annotations view with UIBezierPath and other vectorish methods (from PaintCode). I have noticed however that when loading the map it sometimes takes quite a bit of time for the pins to show up. Would it be better to use a transparent PNG or SVG? What is less memory and processor intensive? What is the best practice?

Thanks

Answer 1

Loading an image file using [UIImage imageNamed:] seems less processor intensive than calling drawRect and its associated UIBezierPath drawing methods for each UIView.

drawRect is also called whenever the view is required to update, so it may be called many times.

[UIImage imageNamed:] on the other hand, caches images, which is another optimization.