The latest open-source contribution from LinkedIn isn’t an analytics engine, server design or some other bleeding-edge backend technology for a change. Instead, the social media giant is releasing a caching system called Rocket Data that aims to help mobile developers improve the performance of their apps.

The project was born in early 2015 when LinkedIn launched an effort to streamline its flagship iOS client and found Apple’s built-in cache inadequate for the task. The company’s engineers had many gripes about the software: It’s difficult to manage, takes a long time to fire up when used in large apps and often runs slowly. But worst of all, there were no viable alternatives. Facebook Inc. had encountered similar issues with the cache while upgrading its mobile News Feed a few years prior and needed to write a custom data access model from scratch to improve usability. So LinkedIn ended up doing the same.

Rocket Data isn’t a cache in and of itself but rather a management framework that is meant to be layered over an external key-value store. Its arguably biggest advantage over the default iOS option is in the multithreading department, which is where the bulk of the latter’s performance issues are rooted. Apple’s software usually requires caching operations to be handled by an app’s main UI thread and can slow rendering as a result. LinkedIn deliberately avoided introducing this limitation into its project to let app creators handle data management in a more efficient manner.  Additionally, the company included a pausing feature that makes it possible to improve performance even further by freezing the flow of information to background threads. The mechanism prevents tabs from unnecessarily refreshing when they’re not being actively viewed by the user.

In the interest of easing deployment, Rocket Data’s inner workings are hidden behind a relatively simple API that lets developers quickly tailor its behavior to their needs. And it’s also possible to customize the underlying source-code if necessary thanks to the project’s open-source license. The code and documentation are available now on GitHub.

Image via Geralt