Efficient caching of rich data sets

Sammanfattning: The importance of a smooth user experience in applications is increasing. To achieve more performance when interacting with resource intensive data it is important to implement an efficient caching method. The goal of this thesis is to investigate how to implement an efficient cache in an Android application. The use case is to download metadata and images of movies from a WebAPI provided by June AB. In order to investigate which caching method is the most efficient, a pre-study was done on some of the most common caching methods today. Based on the results of the pre-study, two different caching algorithms were tested and evaluated: First-In First-Out (FIFO) and Least Recently Used (LRU). These two algorithms were then implemented in an Android application. The resulting prototype has a responsive user interface capable of caching large amounts of data without noticeable performance loss compared to a non-cached version. The results from the prototype showed that LRU is the better strategy in our use case, however what we discovered was that the buffer size of the cache has the biggest impact on performance, not the cache eviction strategy.