Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Monday, 1st March 2021

How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70% (via) Incredible debugging war story: t0st was fed up of waiting six minutes (!) for GTA Online to load on their PC, so they used a host of devious debugging tricks to try and figure out what was going on. It turned out the game was loading a 10MB JSON file detailing all of the available in-game purchases, but inefficient JSON parsing meant it was pegging an entire CPU for 4 minutes mainly running the strlen() C function. Despite not having access to source code or debugging symbols t0st figured out the problem and managed to inject a custom DLL that hooked some internal functions and dropped load times down from 6m down to to 1m50s! # 7:12 pm

Drawing the rest of the owl

My ambitious goal for the day was to get the new Django/PostgreSQL preview into a state where we could start sending example API requests to it from the help.vaccinate app.

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2021 » March

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