We’ll go through a high level overview of how the golang garbage collector works. We’ll also touch on the one knob we have to tweak, the garbage collector GCPercent and when it might make sense to do so.
As a golang developer, I usually assume that something is going to clean up memory and my programs will ‘just work’. But it’s worth it to take a peek under the covers to understand the tradeoffs that have been made for performance.
In 20 minutes we’re going to run through a very high level overview of how the golang garbage collector works. I’ll illustrate what happens when a ‘stop-the-world’ is called and we’ll reason about how it impacts running go programs. We’ll also touch on the one knob we have to tweak, the garbage collector GCPercent and when it might make sense to use it.