ios - iPad - Parsing an extremely huge json - File (between 50 and 100 mb)

Question

I'm trying to parse an extremely big json-File on an iPad. The filesize will vary between 50 and 100 mb (there is an initial file and there will be one new full set of data every month, which will be downloaded, parsed and saved into coredata)

I'm building this app for a company as an Enterprise solution - the json file contains sensitive customerdata and it needs to be saved locally on the ipad so it will work even offline. It worked when the file was below 20mb, but now the set of data became bigger and I really need to parse it. I'm receiving memory warnings during parsing and after the third warning it just crashes. I have several different Core Data entities and I'm just setting all the values coming from the json file (when app is launched for the first time) and after everything is done, I'm doing the [context save].

I was hoping somebody could give me some advice on how to handle such huge files. I was thinking about splitting the json file up to several smaller json files and maybe parsing them in multiple threads, but I don't know if that's the right approach. I guess one big problem is that the whole file is being held in the memory - maybe there's some way of "streaming" it into the memory or something like that?

I'm using JSONKit (https://github.com/johnezang/JSONKit) for parsing the file, since I have read that it's the fastest one (maybe there's a slower one which goes easier on memory?).

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1) Write your data to a file, then use NSData's dataWithContentsOfFile:options:error: and specify the NSDataReadingMappedAlways and NSDataReadingUncached flags. This will tell the system to use mmap() to reduce the memory footprint, and not to burden the file system cache with blocks of memory (that makes it slower, but much less of a burden to iOS).

2) You can use the YAJL SAX style JSON parser to get objects as they decode.

Note: I have not done 2) but have used the techniques embodied in 1).

3) I ended up needed such a thing myself, and wrote SAX-JSON-Parser-ForStreamingData that can be tied to any asynchronous downloader (including my own).