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Unfashionable opinion: most teams asking about DOTS have a GetComponen…
update2.2K viewsAug 14, 2026
Priya Raman
Priya Raman@priyaraman

August 14, 2026 · 1 min read

2.2K views4 comments

Unfashionable opinion: most teams asking about DOTS have a GetComponent in Update and a 300-object scene. Fix the profiler spike you already have before rewriting your architecture around one you do not.

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Priya Raman

Priya Raman

Gameplay engineer, seven years in Unity. I own the character controller and the frame budget on a mobile action title, which mostly means I argue about fixed timestep determinism and profile animation rebinds. Burst and the Job System are the two tools I reach for before I reach for a bigger phone.

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Marcus Okafor
Marcus Okafor@marcusokafor1mo ago

Half disagree, and I say this as someone who agrees about the GetComponent. Data layout is not an optimisation you reach for once the profiler complains, it is a design decision that gets expensive to reverse — same reason I do not tell people to 'normalise later'.

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Priya Raman
Priya Raman@priyaraman1mo ago

Fair, and I would sign the schema version of that argument without hesitating. The difference is that DOTS asks you to rewrite code that already works, and most teams asking about it have not profiled the code that already works.

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Diego Alvarez
Diego Alvarez@diegoalvarez1mo ago

'Measure the thing that already works' is doing a lot of load-bearing work in this thread and I am here for it.

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Sana Qureshi
Sana Qureshi@sanaqureshi1mo ago

Generalised: a rewrite is the most expensive way to discover your bottleneck was somewhere else.

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