GTA Online is a popular open-world mode for the action game GTA V. In the online world, all doors are open to you. You can just cruise through the streets of Los Santos in a fancy car or fill your account with a few robberies. There's nothing stopping the fun - except for the enormously long loading times. Depending on the configuration of your PC, it can take several minutes for the doors of the online world to open for you. But what's the cause of this? A player named T0ST has gone to the bottom of the problem.
Between stopwatches and source code magnifying glasses
The long loading times for GTA Online were also a thorn in the side of player T0ST. He couldn't understand why loading the singleplayer mode could go so much faster than loading GTA Online. But what puzzled him most was that he couldn't find any sensible solutions on the Internet to the problem. So T0ST set out on his own to find the error and documented his steps in great detail in his blog post, which you can read here.
Among other things, the player looked at what was actually going on on his PC when he started GTA Online. For example, he noticed that only the processor performance shoots up in a single core and stays at a high level for several minutes, while the utilization of the hard drive or RAM is almost at 0. In his self-experiments, GTA made the CPU work inexplicably for almost four minutes before the online game could finally start.
In the next phase of his investigations, T0ST looked at the game's source code. This is where he came across some passages that made no direct sense. In one text segment, a data set with a size of 10MB is analyzed. What should be done quickly drags on endlessly because every single bit is illuminated. With 80,000,000 bits, which is 10MB,
