Conceptually, I think the correct time to do garbage collection is when your web server process is idle. My Crystal implementation of idle-time garbage collect

Conceptually, I think the correct time to do garbage collection is when your web server process is idle. My Crystal implementation of idle-time garbage collection is here: https://github.com/compumike/idle-gc https://github.com/compumike/idle-gc though please note that its idle detection mechanism only works for single-threaded Crystal programs. An analogy is to imagine a single employee (thread) operating a convenience store. If there are customers waiting in the checkout line (latency-sensitive requests), the employee should priorities serving the customers ASAP! But once the line is empty (thread is idle), that might be a good time to start sweeping. Right now, with automatic garbage collection, the employee only decides to start sweeping the entire store while in the middle of serving a customer! (Because that's when mallocs are happening, which may trigger automatic GC.) Pretty ridiculous! With idle-time GC, the sweeping happens entirely or mostly while there are no customers waiting. This may not show latency improvements in an artificial benchmark where the system is running flat-out with a full request queue, but in the real world, it changes GC from something that happens 100% of the time in the middle of a request is being served (because that's when mallocs happen and trigger automatic GC), to something that only rarely or never happens while a request is being served. Even better would be to combine idle-time GC with incremental GC, so that the employee could put down the broom when a new customer arrives without finishing sweeping the entire store. :) See also "Idle Time Garbage Collection Scheduling" in Google Chrome (2016): PDF at https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.com/en//pubs/archive/45361.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...