I have to say, I’ve done optimization work on lots of projects over the years, and it’s rare that you’ll see a single piece of functionality leave a path of destruction this massive in its wake. The usual patterns you’ll see are either “localized performance hog” (a few functions completely dominating the profile, like I saw in the first round with the texture loading) or the “death by a thousand paper cuts”, where the profile is dominated by lots of “middle-man” functions that let someone else do the actual work but add a little overhead each time. As you can see, that’s not what’s going on here. What we have here is the rare “death in all directions” variant. Why settle for paper cuts, just go straight for the damn cluster bomb!
A string processing rant
