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.

> 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.

In GTA V, when I tried to enjoy multiplayer with my friends the abysmal load times were what killed it for me.

You actually have to load into the game world - which takes forever - before having a friend invite you to their multiplayer world - which takes forever, again.

So both a coffee, and a piss. Maybe they fixed that now?

I agree. I played GTA online for a bit and quite enjoyed it but I haven't touched it in a while and the insane loading times are a big reason why.

It kind of baffles me that they haven't bothered to fix this trivial issue when the result is to cut 4 entire minutes of loading time.

Back in dialup/DSL days I discovered a texture compression issue in America's Army (the free US Army game) that doubled its download/install size. Typical download times were about a day and the resume mechanism was poor, so this had the potential to save a lot of grief, not to mention hosting costs. I emailed them, they banned me for hacking, and the next version still had the same issue. Shrug.