Note: as of iOS5, this is no longer needed. NSURLCache now properly caches objects, as long as the Cache-Control header is set.

This is a fork of https://github.com/rs/SDURLCache, that drops iOS3 and uses ARC. The changes to use GDC and the improved date parsing are also a potential speed-bump, although I haven't gone through the effort to actually benchmark this.

On iPhone OS, Apple did remove on-disk cache support for unknown reason. Some will say it's to save flash-drive life, others will arg it's to save disk capacity. As it is explained in the NSURLCacheStoragePolicy, the NSURLCacheStorageAllowed constant is always treated as NSURLCacheStorageAllowedInMemoryOnly and there is no way to force it back, the code is certainly gone on this platform. For whatever reason Apple removed this feature, you may be interested by having on-disk HTTP request caching in your application. SDURLCache gives back this feature to this iPhone OS for you.

To use it, you just have create an instance, replace the default shared NSURLCache with it and that's it, you instantly give on-disk HTTP request caching capability to your application.

SDURLCache *urlCache = [[SDURLCache alloc] initWithMemoryCapacity:1024*1024   // 1MB mem cache
                                                     diskCapacity:1024*1024*5 // 5MB disk cache
                                                         diskPath:[SDURLCache defaultCachePath]];
[NSURLCache setSharedURLCache:urlCache];
// [urlCache release]; (if you don't yet use ARC)

To save flash drive, SDURLCache doesn't cache on disk responses if cache expiration delay is lower than 5 minutes by default. You can change this behavior by changing the minCacheInterval property.

Cache eviction is done automatically when disk capacity is outreached in a periodic maintenance thread. All disk write operations are done in a separated thread so they can't block the main run loop.

To control the caching behavior, use the NSURLRequest's cachePolicy property. If you want a response not to be cached on disk but still in memory, you can implement the NSURLConnection connection:willCacheResponse: delegate method and change the NSURLCachedResponse storagePolicy property to NSURLCacheStorageAllowedInMemoryOnly. See example below:

- (NSCachedURLResponse *)connection:(NSURLConnection *)connection
                  willCacheResponse:(NSCachedURLResponse *)cachedResponse
{
    NSCachedURLResponse *memOnlyCachedResponse =
        [[NSCachedURLResponse alloc] initWithResponse:cachedResponse.response
                                                 data:cachedResponse.data
                                             userInfo:cachedResponse.userInfo
                                        storagePolicy:NSURLCacheStorageAllowedInMemoryOnly];
    return [memOnlyCachedResponse autorelease];
}