How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

It is absolutely unbelievable (and unforgivable) that a cash cow such as GTA V has a problem like this present for over 6 years and it turns out to be something so absolutely simple.

I do not agree with the sibling comment saying that this problem only looks simple and that we are missing context.

This online gamemode alone made $1 billion in 2017 alone.

Tweaking two functions to go from a load time of 6 minutes to less than two minutes is something any developer worth their salt should be able to do in a codebase like this equipped with a good profiler.

Instead, someone with no source code managed to do this to an obfuscated executable loaded with anti-cheat measures.

The fact that this problem is caused by Rockstar's excessive microtransaction policy (the 10MB of JSON causing this bottleneck are all available microtransaction items) is the cherry on top.

(And yes, I might also still be salty because their parent company unjustly DMCA'd re3 (https://github.com/GTAmodding/re3), the reverse engineered version of GTA III and Vice City. A twenty-year-old game. Which wasn't even playable without purchasing the original game.)

The old maxim of "Premature optimization is the root of all evil" has over time evolved to "If you care one iota about performance, you are not a good programmer".

That doesn't really apply here. I don't even play GTA V but the #1 complain I've always heard for the past 6 years is that the load times are the worst thing about the game. Once something is known to be the biggest bottleneck in the enjoyment of your game, it's no longer "premature optimization". The whole point of that saying is that you should first make things, then optimize things that bring the bring the most value. The load time is one of the highest value things you can cut down on. And the fact that these two low hanging fruit made such a big difference tells me they never gave it a single try in the past 6 years.