“Replacing the sscanf call with strtof improved startup by nearly a factor of 10: from 1.8 seconds to 199 milliseconds.”
Everyone laughed at Rockstar for the GTA Online loading bug. Then a guy who writes a high-performance 3D viewer found the same sscanf trap in his own parser. The C docs list no time complexity for sscanf. The footgun was standard equipment the whole time.