I'm building a simple talker/listener app that receives OSC data through UDP. I'm using OSCKit pod which itself uses CocoaAsyncSocket library for the internal UDP communication.
When I'm listening to a particular port to receive data from another OSC capable software, I log the received commands to a NSTextView. The problem is that sometimes, I receive thousands of messages in a very short period of time (EDIT: I just added a counter to see how many messages I'm receiving. I got over 14000 in just a few seconds and that is only a single moving object in my software). There is no way to predict when this is gonna happen so I cannot lock the textStorage object of the NSTextView to keep it from sending all its notifications to update the UI. The data is processed through a delegate callback function.
So how would you go around that limitation?
///Handle incoming OSC messages
func handle(_ message: OSCMessage!) {
print("OSC Message: \(message)")
let targetPath = message.address
let args = message.arguments
let msgAsString = "Path: \"\(targetPath)\"\nArguments: \n\(args)\n\n"
print(msgAsString)
oscLogView.string?.append(msgAsString)
oscLogView.scrollToEndOfDocument(self)
}
As you can see here (this is the callback function) I'm updating the TextView directly from the callback (both adding data and scrolling to the end), every time a message is received. This is where Instruments tell me the slow down happens and the append is the slowest one. I didn't go further than that in the analysis, but it certainly is due to the fact that it tries to do a visual update, which takes a lot more time than parsing 32bits of data, and when it's finished it receives another update right away from the server's buffer.
Could I send that call to the background thread? I don't feel like filling up the background thread with visual updates is such a great idea. Maybe growing my own string buffer and flushing it to the TextView every now and then with a timer?
I want to give this a console feel, but a console that freezes is not a console.
Here is a link to the project on github. the pods are all there and configured with cocoapods, so just open the workspace. You guys might not have anything to generate that much OSC traffic, but if you really feel like digging in, you can get IanniX, which is an open-source sequencer/trajectory automator that can generate OSC and a lot of it. I've just downloaded it and I'll build a quick project that should send enough data to freeze the app and I'll add it to the repo if anybody want to give it a shot.
I append the incoming data to a buffer variable and I use a timer that flushes that buffer to the textview every 0.2 seconds. The update cycle of the textview is way too slow to handle the amount of incoming data so unloding the network callback to a timer let the server process the data instead of being stopped every 32bits.
If anybody come up with a more elegant method, I'm open minded.