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.)

It's not just believable, but it's normal. I have spent quite a bit of my career maintaining software, and I don't recall one employers where low hanging fruit like this wasn't available everywhere.

The problem is not that developers can't optimize things: you will find some developers capable of figuring this problem out anywhere. What makes this low hanging fruit so popular is the fact that we aren't measuring enough, and even when we do, we aren't necessarily prioritizing looking into things that are suspiciously slow.

In the case of this example, the issue is also client-side, so it's not as if it's costing CPU time to Rockstar, so it's unlikely you'll have someone who can claim their job description includes wondering if the load times are worth optimizing. When problems like this one get solved is because someone who is very annoyed by the problem and either convinces a developer to even look into the problem. Most of the time, the people that suffer, the people that get to decide how to allocate the time, and the people that are in a position to evaluate the root cause of the problem never even get to talk to each other. It's the price we often pay for specialization and organizations with poor communication.

Organizations where the people deciding what has to be done next, and where the company culture dictates that the way forward is to either complete more tickets faster, or find ways to be liked by your manager, are not going to be fostering the kind of thinking that solves a problem like this one, but that's a lot of what you find in many places. A developer with a full plate that is just working on the next feature isn't going to spend their time wondering about load times.

But instead we end up blaming the developers themselves, instead of the culture that they swim in.