Let It Go: Relieving Garbage Collection Pain for Latency Critical Applications in Golang

Garbage Collection (GC) is a representative automatic memory manager widely deployed in popular programming languages, such as Java, C#, and Golang (Go). Through GC, these languages provide programmers with flexibility and safety. However, GC leads to non-trivial overhead in compute and memory resources during application runtime. GC threads compete with non-GC threads (mutators) of an application, which particularly impacts latency-critical (LC) applications and causes long tail latency. Existing GC approaches do not efficiently address the interference, as GC is triggered passively without a global insight of the application; or they employ incremental GC to reduce the interference, while the incremental progress is not dynamically tailored during GC process according to runtime characteristics, which leads to significant performance degradation upon bursty requests.