How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

This is why I come to HN, I was going to skip this because I thought it was about video games, but really glad to have read it, and loved every line of the article.

So much to get from this.

Even if you don't have the source, you can make a change if you are annoyed enough.

If you don't like something, and the source code is out there, really go contribute.

Performance matters, know how to profile and if using an external dependency, then figure out their implementation details.

Algorithms & Data structures matter, often I see devs talking about how it doesn't matter much but the difference between using a hashmap vs array is evident.

Attentive code reviews matter, chances are they gave this to a junior dev/intern, and it worked with a small dataset and no one noticed.

I always tell a story about an application we ran, it generated its own interface based on whatever was in inventory. Someone did something really stupid and duplicated each inventory item for each main unit we sold...so you had recursive mess. Assigning 100,000 items when previously it was 100-ish

Anyway, everyone just rolled their eyes and blamed the fact that the app was written in Java.

It ended up generating an XML file during that minute long startup....so we just saved the file to the network and loaded it on startup. If inventory changed, we’d re-generate the file once and be done with it.

It's a lot easier to blame an language for being slow because it's obvious. Blaming algorithms requiresputying in the time to figure things out.