This is not nitpicking. The OP was implying they were using alloc/free in their GC. Those calls can be doing all sorts of book keeping behind the scenes, includ

This is not nitpicking. The OP was implying they were using alloc/free in their GC. Those calls can be doing all sorts of book keeping behind the scenes, including cascading destructor calls which could free a chain of objects the size of live memory. Suffice it to say, that would pause.