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 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.

For what it's worth, 10MB of JSON is not much. Duplicating the example entry from the article 63000 times (replacing `key` by a uuid4 for unicity) yields 11.5MB JSON.

Deserialising that JSON then inserting each entry in a dict (indexed by key) takes 450ms in Python.

But as Bruce Dawson oft notes, quadratic behaviour is the sweet spot because it's "fast enough to go into production, and slow enough to fall over once it gets there". Here odds are there were only dozens or hundreds of items during dev so nobody noticed it would become slow as balls beyond a few thousand items.

Plus load times are usually the one thing you start ignoring early on, just start the session, go take a coffee or a piss, and by the time you're back it's loaded. Especially after QA has notified of slow load times half a dozen times, the devs (with fast machines and possibly smaller development dataset) go "works fine", and QA just gives up.

You mention quadratic behaviours and there's probably some truth to that, but it seems to me that it's partly a C++ problem. In any other langauge nobody would even consider hacking up JSON parsing using a string function. They'd use the stdlib functional if available or import a library, and this problem wouldn't exist.