title: How to approach 'caching' in iOS development with Swift
body: <p>I am facing some issues in terms of what caching mechanism to implement for my iOS application. First, lets explain my situation.</p>
  
  <p>I want to request thousands of nearby locations records (10000 and more) through a RESTful API on my server using <strong>Alamofire</strong>, where each record consists of a bunch of strings. The JSON response format looks similar to this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>[
     {
       "id": 1,
       "name": "Name x",
       "lat": 59.5025878,
       "lng": -0.1509515,
       "address": "Address x"
     },
     {
       "id": 2,
       "name": "Name y",
       "lat": 61.5025878,
       "lng": -0.1508515,
       "address": "Address y"
     },
  
     etc.
  
   ]
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The key is that I only want to send/resend this query when the application launches or after a certain amount of time has passed or when the app user moved his/her location considerably that it would also change the nearby locations. In order to keep the server load low I am planning to do search queries on returned locations inside the app instead of querying the server for every single request, which would be really inefficient and costly.</p>
  
  <p>As a result, I want to cache my response data on the phone but I don't know what option to go with. I did some background reading on both <strong>CoreData</strong> and <strong>NSCache</strong>. CoreData would allow me to store the location results in a database. This has the benefit that stored records stay alive internally, since it is a permanent storage solution after all. On the other side, using CoreData might be a complete overkill as it comes with an overhead and keeping the location records in cache using <strong>NSCache</strong> would probably not use much memory (remember I am storing just strings). But then again, why keeping location data in the cache, when user might not even access them that often. Also, there is the chance that location entries in the cache will be freed up to save up more memory.</p>
  
  <p>I am sure there are other solutions out there that might even be better suited for my purpose. After all, I am quite new to this topic in iOS, hence I would really appreciate some guidance.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you in advance.</p>