My list of friends includes an avatar icon for each of them. These are downloaded from the web, which takes time. So I decided to cache them locally on the iPhone, and while the performance improved a bit, it didn’t improve as much as I’d hoped. The next thing I need to do is only store one version of an icon in memory at once. But this will only help if more than one friend has the same avatar.

Another optimization I did was to load the avatar right away in the init… method, instead of putting a placeholder there and replacing it. (Which is what the SeismicXML sample, upon which my app is based, did.) This gave a large performance increase, which I was pleasantly surprised about.