Regarding latency spikes: that's not entirely true. If you drop the last reference to an object, then freeing that object can cause the last reference to other

Regarding latency spikes: that's not entirely true. If you drop the last reference to an object, then freeing that object can cause the last reference to other objects to be dropped, etc. So it's possible that dropping a reference can cause a large amount of work, which if it happens during a critical path can cause a latency spike. Particularly if finalisers are involved. If your object ownership graph is straightforward this isn't a problem, but if you have large objects with shared ownership it's very easy to be surprised here. (Used to work on a object-oriented operating system which used reference counting everywhere, and I discovered this the hard way.) I don't follow your comment about binary blobs?