Parse SaveInBackgroundWithBlock takes a lot of time

Question

I have a parse class(named "Story") with following columns:

contents - Array of Pointers to Media class
creator - User pointer
lastPosted - Date
title - String
users - array of pointers to User class

I am trying to update a PFObject from "Story" class like this

storyObject.addUniqueObjectsFromArray(selectedFriends, forKey: "users")
storyObject.setObject(createStoryTextField.text, forKey: "title")
storyObject.saveInBackgroundWithBlock({ (succeed: Bool, error: NSError?) -> Void in
    hud.hide(true)
})

In some cases the completion block takes a lot of time to complete. By debugging, I have found that the more objects in the "contents" column, the longer it takes. But I haven't even updated the "contents". All the values in the code are not nil. I checked for that too. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

This is potentially expected behavior. In general when you put something on a background thread (like saveInBackgroundWithBlock is almost definitely doing) it will take a lot longer to complete than if you call it on the main thread. If you need it to return quickly and don't mind blocking the UI, you can use the save: method.

You also may want to check to see how many requests you are making simultaneously as this may slow down each one.

Finally, if you want to customize the network behavior of Parse more than you already do, you can just use the REST API and make all your own network calls (using NSURLSession or a third party library like AFNetworking.)