| This JSON-parsing problem is the least of Rockstars problems I think. But I bet it happened like this: - when the game was still in active development, it was maybe anticipated that the shop might have a couple dozen items, no problem even when the JSON parsing is extremely slow - game is released, a separate maintenance team takes over, online mode is running for several years - over time more and more items are added to the shop, and now maybe there are a thousands of items in that JSON file - ...and when there's some 'accidental exponential' code in the JSON loader/parser the loading time gets worse and worse, what once was a few milliseconds is now minutes, but there was never a sudden regression after an update, just every week a little bit slower - depending on the churn on the maintenance team, the current people on the team probably don't even notice an increase in loading time until they leave again for greener pastures, e.g. for them "it has always been that slow" - management probably first read about the problem in the news ;) (which of course is a problem on its own - but as long as the money keeps flowing and the curves in Tableau go up and up, why should they even care... players apparently also endured it without bringing out the pitchforks) |
I've done this kind of stuff many times, and something like a json array taking minutes to parse would likely be very very obvious when looking at a trace.