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deepmind.google·6d ago
AI Engineering
Hacker News·7d ago·5 min read
A 40ms Go garbage collector pause caused by swap
TL;DR
Running swap in a production environment can lead to significant garbage collection pauses in Go applications, as demonstrated by a 40ms delay caused by memory pressure. This highlights the risks of using swap when managing memory spikes.
✦ Why It Matters
Avoid using swap in production environments to prevent performance degradation in Go applications.
Key Takeaways
- Do not use swap in production for Go applications.
- Monitor garbage collection pauses to identify performance issues.
- Consider the impact of memory pressure on application performance.
- Test applications under load to understand GC behavior.
How It Works
Go's garbage collector operates in a stop-the-world manner, meaning it halts all goroutines to perform memory management tasks. When memory pressure occurs, the kernel may evict pages to swap, including those containing GC metadata.
During GC cycles, if the metadata is swapped out, the GC must handle page faults, which can lead to significant delays as the kernel retrieves the necessary pages from disk.