How offloading UI calculations to background threads fixed a real-time trading app freeze
A mobile developer at a trading firm encountered severe UI freezes during peak hours after expanding real-time WebSocket data from 10 to up to 137 price levels per stock. The app received around 30 data packages per second, and seemingly minor operations like number formatting, color calculation, and localization overwhelmed the main thread at that volume. An initial attempt to fix performance using Diffable Data Source backfired, as the feature is optimized for partial updates — not full list replacements — making overhead worse. Profiling revealed the true bottleneck: computed properties being evaluated on the main thread for every update cycle. The fix involved moving all calculations to background threads during WebSocket response parsing, leaving the UI layer to simply display pre-computed values, which restored smooth scrolling under peak load.
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