Simon Willison’s Weblog

1st March 2021 - Link Blog

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!