How to use multithreaded operations with OperationQueue

Swift version: 5.6

Paul Hudson @twostraws May 28th 2019

There are lots of ways to work with Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) on iOS, but OperationQueue is particularly powerful because it lets you control precisely how many simultaneous operations can run and what quality of service you need, while also letting you schedule work using closures. You can even ask the operation queue to wait until all its operations are finished, which makes scheduling easier.

If you had an array of images you needed to process then save somewhere, you might normally write a loop like this:

for image in images {
    process(image)
}

However, that’s single-threaded – it can only use one of the available CPU cores. With only a small change you can get the same behavior working across multiple cores, and the operation queue will wait until it’s all complete so it doesn’t change the meaning of your code:

let queue = OperationQueue()

for image in images {
    queue.addOperation {
        self.process(image)
    }
}

queue.waitUntilAllOperationsAreFinished()

You can add as many operations as you want, but they don’t all get executed at the same time. Instead, OperationQueue limits the number of operations based on system conditions – if it’s a more powerful device that isn’t doing much right now, you’ll get more operations than a less powerful device or a device that’s busy with other work.

You can override this behavior if you need something specific: