In his description of the process, T0ST points to the game’s single-threaded CPU bottleneck and a “badly constructed” 10MB JSON file that can contain all of the items and updates for the game that can be purchased from GTA Online. When it finds an item, this file checks an entire array with 63,000 entries, and T0ST says it does this check almost 2 billion times, which they believe is delaying the loading process.
T0ST tried to smooth this process and, with some corrections, decreased the loading time by 69.4%. “It won’t solve everyone’s loading times – there may be other bottlenecks in different systems, but it’s such a big hole that I have no idea how R * lost it all these years,” says T0ST.
Finishing its part, the coder goes directly to Rockstar, noting that “it should not take more than a day for a single developer to solve” and offering a set of solutions for the company to implement the correction. There was no word from Rockstar about seeing the post, but T0ST had to update it to ask players to stop sending the link to the company’s support account, in case it disrupts normal customer service requests.
In other GTA Online news, Take-Two Interactive recently forced a GTA Online cheat maker to close and donate its profits to charities.
Jordan Oloman is a freelance writer for IGN, who has spent hours of his life on the loading screens of GTA Online. Follow him on Twitter.