Improving UIWebView initialization time

Question

My company uses a UIWebView to display ads. The issue I'm having is that initializing a UIWebView appears to be expensive; profiling with Time Profiler shows [UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectMake(0,0,500,500)] to take 31–40ms. This is enough to cause noticeable frame drops in games running at 60 FPS.

Is there a way to workaround this slow initialization time? My current ideas are to create a UIWebView when the app launches (but before gameplay has started), and reuse that (potentially creating a pool of them to reuse, like how UITableViewCell works) or to try and see if WKWebView has better performance.

Answer 1

Here are my findings:

1. WKWebView does not initialize any faster. Creating WKWebViews took a similar amount of time as creating UIWebViews (in the 1 test I did, it took 46ms to create two WKWebViews.
2. The very first web view created takes significantly longer to create than subsequent web views. The first one takes 31–42 ms; subsequent ones take ~11ms to create. The good news here is that creating the first web view when e.g. the app launches allows future webviews to be created more cheaply, avoiding a 40ms hit while the game is running.
3. Creating a pool of UIWebViews was a good solution for my use case. By creating the webviews at app launch and then reusing them, I avoid causing a frame drop while the game is running.