Large UIImage drawinrect extremely slow on selection - iphone

Question

I have a custom UITableView cell that sports an Image, and a headline. I used the fast scrolling example of ABTableViewCell from atebits.
It seems when I select the first row (which is my row with the largest image) it takes a considerable amoun of time to highlight the row, and then push the new view controller.
However when I select any of the other rows, with much smaller images, its almost instant.
Ive attempted to draw the picture using CGContextDrawImage and drawInRect but both yield the same results.
- (void)drawContentView:(CGRect)r highlighted:(BOOL)highlighted {
if ([type isEqualToString:#"first"]) {
CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
UIColor *backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor];
UIColor *textColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
UIColor *textBackgroundColor = [[UIColor alloc] initWithWhite:0 alpha:.5];
UIColor *highlightColor;
if (highlighted) {
backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
textColor = [UIColor blueColor];
highlightColor = [[UIColor alloc] initWithWhite:0 alpha:.3];
} else {
highlightColor = [UIColor clearColor];
}
[backgroundColor set];
CGContextFillRect(context, r);
[self.picture drawInRect:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 320, 225)];
[textBackgroundColor set];
CGContextFillRect(context, CGRectMake(0, 170, 320, 55));
[textColor set];
[self.title drawInRect:CGRectMake(5, 170, 320, 55) withFont:firstHeadlineFont lineBreakMode:UILineBreakModeWordWrap];
[highlightColor set];
CGContextFillRect(context, r);
} else {
CGContextRef context = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext();
UIColor *backgroundColor = [UIColor blackColor];
UIColor *textColor = [UIColor blueColor];
if (highlighted) {
backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
textColor = [UIColor whiteColor];
}
[backgroundColor set];
CGContextFillRect(context, r);
CGPoint p;
p.x = 0;
p.y = 0;
[self.picture drawInRect:CGRectMake(0.0, 0.0, 44, 44)];
[textColor set];
p.x += 44 + 6; // space between words
[self.title drawAtPoint:p withFont:[UIFont systemFontOfSize:20]];
}
}
EDIT:
IS there anything I can do to speed this up? I am caching the image and reading it as well.

Answer 1

I realized I was using a very very large version of the image for my first row, I was able to scale it down before I pulled it from the webserver and this vastly improved performance. NOTE: double check your dimensions are not huge. IE: 2184x1456 hahah