I don't agree with your pause time estimates. Most collectors are fast with small amounts of garbage in a small application. It's high allocation rates where GC time becomes a problem, and I don't see anything about Go or V8 designs to prevent very bad worst-case pause times.
Uh, most of the rant about Go GC below is out of date, they made some huge improvements from 2016-now. I'm leaving it up because someone replied to it
Unless something has changed in the last year or two, Go's GC is similar to Java's old CMS collector which is being deprecated.
Go's GC is non generational and non compacting, both hallmarks of modern GC algorithms. It's not a modern "moving" collector. It also has several stop the world phases. It's basically a design from the 70's. The GC uses old simple algorithms because the team was under a time crunch when it was developed. This may have changed, but that's how it was in 2018-2019 timeframe.
The pause times are short because GC runs very frequently. It has to because performance with large amounts of garbage is quite bad. This results in significant GC CPU overhead.
I don't know much about V8 collector besides that it is generational and compacting, so more modern than Go. But it's still a "stop the world" design. In that regard it's still closest to Javas old CMS collector.
Javas new collectors, ZGC and Shenandoah, both have near constant time stop the world phases. You can collect terabytes of garbage with only a few milliseconds pause. In V8 or Go, this would be many seconds pause time as the mark phase is "stop the world" in both.
You can find benchmarks that show one way or the other, but in badly behaving or allocation heavy applications, Java's new collectors or older G1 will perform far better. V8 and Go are dishonest about their GC performance by showing average pause times with high collection frequency. The important GC cycles are the long ones, so you really want to measure worse case pause time under load.
Under heavy load Go's design falls over. It's not compacting, not generational, and the mark phase pauses the application. IMO, it's just not a good GC. V8 is better, it is generational and compacting, but mark phase is still STW. Java's ZGC isn't generational but importantly, the mark and sweep phases don't stop execution. No matter how big your heap is and how much garbage, your GC pauses will be short
> I don't know much about V8 collector besides that it is generational and compacting, so more modern than Go. But it's still a "stop the world" design. In that regard it's still closest to Javas old CMS collector.
> ... In V8 or Go, this would be many seconds pause time as the mark phase is "stop the world" in both.
Like I said before, your information is outdated. V8 has both incremental and concurrent marking. I even mentioned it in my comment, but apparently you didn't read that either. V8 only stops the world for semispace evacuation and compaction. It doesn't compact the entire old generation at once, but decides on a per-page basis.
For Go's GC, I am going by public information presented by one of its primary designers, Rick Hudson, who has since retired.
Java's new GCs sound fantastic! It's great for the field in general. However, I would encourage you to spend less time misrepresenting other people's work and making up numbers.
V8 still uses STW for mark sweep. The benchmark image on this https://v8.dev/blog/concurrent-marking shows 50+ms pause time, quite bad compared to ~5ms or less in new Java collectors. This might be due to STW move phase though? They don't really explain, but the long pause times show that there's definitely still long STW pauses in V8.
For Go, I'm going to be a bad HN user and not read the whole article. Sorry, it's just too long for this time of night. It does appear that my understanding of Go GC is out of date. There's been many improvements in the last couple years. Some strange behavior due to not enough knobs to configure GC, but it appears to have a near constant GC pause? https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2019/04/10/go-memory-ballast-how-i...
I'm annoyed that Google doesn't offer much benchmarking results for V8. Huge articles about improvements made with a single benchmark image. And they didn't use standard benchmarks for either so it's unclear what they're even benchmarking. The Go slides you linked include benchmarks from some guys production server he tweeted images of, a bunch of standard benchmarks but they only show % throughout improvement, and no pause times.
Well unfortunately you are still misunderstanding, so let me be more precise so we are talking about the same thing. V8 uses incremental marking (i.e. splitting mark work into smaller chunks and interleaving those chunks with mutator time) as well as concurrent marking (i.e. multiple parallel collector threads marking in the background, concurrent with the mutator). Not mentioned in the article, but sweeping of pages is also incremental (i.e. dead space reclaimed on-demand when free lists run empty) and concurrent when idle (i.e. in the background). So the statement "V8 still uses STW for mark sweep" is just wrong. Like I said before, V8 only stops the world for semispace scavenges (fast, < 1ms) and compaction (slow, ??ms), but compaction is less frequent than mark/sweep, which is incremental and concurrent.
You also misunderstood what is reported here. That 50ms main thread marking time is cumulative, meaning those 50ms are spread over the entire garbage collection cycle, split up into small increments so that the mutator (main thread) is not stopped the entire time. It's explained there in the text and illustrated in the second-to-last diagram.
> quite bad compared to ~5ms or less
Again, it is not 50ms pause, it's 50ms work, split into much, much smaller incremental pauses, typically less than 1 ms each. That number is not presented in your linked article but is pretty typical. The V8 GC needs sub-millisecond pause times because it has a soft realtime requirement in that it may end up on the critical path for frame rendering (60fps = 16.6ms).
> For Go, I'm going to be a bad HN user and not read the whole article.
FTA "...The August 2017 release saw little improvement. We know what is causing the remaining pauses. The SLO whisper number here is around 100-200 microseconds and we will push towards that. If you see anything over a couple hundred microseconds then we really want to talk to you and figure out whether it fits into the stuff we know about or whether it is something new we haven't looked into. In any case there seems to be little call for lower latency. It is important to note these latency levels can happen for a wide variety of non-GC reasons..."
TLDR: if you see pause times of more than a couple hundred microseconds, call the red phone.
Also, please note, I am just trying to provide accurate information about the collectors I do know about, designed by people I work(ed) with. I don't know enough about ZGC or Shenenadoah to confidently assert anything about their performance characteristics, but based on what I read I am actually very excited to see them make it into production. I consider advances in GC to be overall a good thing for everyone, and would encourage you to be more open to learning the advantages and disadvantages of various systems without as much derision and not try to pick sides.
Go also has simplified their heap from Java's in a notable way, you cannot set a limit to Go's heap. You can set a limit to the memory used by the Go process, of course.
Uh, most of the rant about Go GC below is out of date, they made some huge improvements from 2016-now. I'm leaving it up because someone replied to it
Unless something has changed in the last year or two, Go's GC is similar to Java's old CMS collector which is being deprecated.
Go's GC is non generational and non compacting, both hallmarks of modern GC algorithms. It's not a modern "moving" collector. It also has several stop the world phases. It's basically a design from the 70's. The GC uses old simple algorithms because the team was under a time crunch when it was developed. This may have changed, but that's how it was in 2018-2019 timeframe.
The pause times are short because GC runs very frequently. It has to because performance with large amounts of garbage is quite bad. This results in significant GC CPU overhead.
I don't know much about V8 collector besides that it is generational and compacting, so more modern than Go. But it's still a "stop the world" design. In that regard it's still closest to Javas old CMS collector.
Javas new collectors, ZGC and Shenandoah, both have near constant time stop the world phases. You can collect terabytes of garbage with only a few milliseconds pause. In V8 or Go, this would be many seconds pause time as the mark phase is "stop the world" in both.
You can find benchmarks that show one way or the other, but in badly behaving or allocation heavy applications, Java's new collectors or older G1 will perform far better. V8 and Go are dishonest about their GC performance by showing average pause times with high collection frequency. The important GC cycles are the long ones, so you really want to measure worse case pause time under load.
Under heavy load Go's design falls over. It's not compacting, not generational, and the mark phase pauses the application. IMO, it's just not a good GC. V8 is better, it is generational and compacting, but mark phase is still STW. Java's ZGC isn't generational but importantly, the mark and sweep phases don't stop execution. No matter how big your heap is and how much garbage, your GC pauses will be short