While I also haven't ever had a cycle in my decades as an engineer, it doesn't really answer the parent's question about pauses w.r.t. ref counting. Ref countin

While I also haven't ever had a cycle in my decades as an engineer, it doesn't really answer the parent's question about pauses w.r.t. ref counting. Ref counting, in the general, isn't free. (Also, in the sense of releasing a cycle, that would be pretty quick, since a typical RC implementation is just going to leak it. Its where a large graph resource graph is successfully ref-counted to 0 that can cause a pause, theoretically, although that's another case I've not seen.)