A Guide to the Go Garbage Collector

Practical guide to GC cost model, pacing, memory limits, and tuning decisions in Go.

• Author: Michael Knyszek
• Authority: primary
• Kind: guide
• URL: https://go.dev/doc/gc-guide

What it covers

• GC cost model
• memory limit and GOGC tuning
• allocation vs collector tradeoffs

Why authoritative

Official guide from Go runtime expert Michael Knyszek.

Use when

• should I tune Go GC here
• how do I reason about Go GC cost
• when should I change GOGC

Keywords

• garbage collector, GC, GOGC, memory limit, allocations

Used by

• garbage-collector
• sync-pool