"in this way, the performance penalty of garbage collection is amortized, and so a long-running application will not mysteriously stop responding from time to t

"in this way, the performance penalty of garbage collection is amortized, and so a long-running application will not mysteriously stop responding from time to time while the garbage collector runs." I think he meant to say un-amortized? Usually amortization in algorithms means that we gather up lots of little chunks of work into one big chunk of work. Here he means that the GC does the exact opposite.