Re:Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity
by eloff on Monday August 31, 2015 @09:42PM
(#10150231)
Unpredictable latency is a huge no-no in these days of responsive server applications. Long GC pauses are just not acceptable to many server developers, so I don't think it's correct to consider it only a client-side problem. If you look at the mechanical sympathy mailing list, you'll see a large group of Official Knob Turners for the Java garbage collectors discussing their trade.
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Re:Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity
by pcwalton on Monday August 31, 2015 @09:46PM
(#10150237)
The point is not that latency doesn't matter. It's that throughput and latency are more or less a fundamental tradeoff in GC, and latency isn't the only thing that matters.
Re:Go GC: Prioritizing low latency and simplicity
by eloff on Monday August 31, 2015 @10:12PM
(#10150312)
Yes, that's true, but this GC lets you get more throughput by using more memory, so you can still decide how you want to make that trade-off. But no amount of knobs can save you from a long stop-the-world pause, so they made absolutely the right decision, in my opinion. With multi-core server CPUs, throughput is relatively cheap to obtain. Latency is hard, you can't just throw money at the problem.