This seems to me, though, like a spot where the application of Knuth's law is critical. It's not enough to demonstrate that X is slower than it could be, you ha

This seems to me, though, like a spot where the application of Knuth's law is critical. It's not enough to demonstrate that X is slower than it could be, you have to demonstrate that it is that, and that this is also having an appreciable impact on the overall behavior of the system. So, given that CockroachDB is a distributed system, I'd want to start by seeing some measurements to demonstrate that GC overhead is having a bigger impact than, say, network latency.