Go-ing Easy on Memory: Writing GC-Friendly code

Motivation

Computer Science curriculums often focus on theoretical lessons, such as how garbage collection (GC) works under the hood or the trade-offs between different GC designs. However, there is much less emphasis on how to write GC-aware code in languages like Go. This is surprising since most of these practices are language-agnostic.

This is a significant gap, especially given GC's impact on application performance. Profiling data from real-world applications consistently shows that a considerable amount of time is spent on memory allocation and GC-related activities.

This talk will be a practical session on writing memory-efficient code, supported by an understanding of Go's garbage collection and memory allocation internals.

The talk

Introduction

I will begin by discussing the motivation behind this talk and explaining why this topic is crucial, backed by empirical profiling data from real-world applications.

Essentials

Next, I’ll provide a high-level overview (a 10,000-foot view) of stack, heap, and GC concepts. This segment will be brief but necessary to establish a foundational understanding.

Main

• Walk through real code examples and demonstrate techniques for writing memory-efficient Go code, such as avoiding pointers, preventing overallocation of slices, minimizing the overuse of interfaces and generics and many more, clarify misconceptions about sync.Pool and leverage it effectively.

• Short Overview of Go's standard tooling for observing memory usage and GC behavior: memory profiler, benchmarking tools, escape analysis, GC configuration, execution tracer. Shed more light on less known/used tools like execution tracer.

Finish

Finish the talk by emphasizing that writing allocation-friendly code is crucial for maintaining application performance and should not be overlooked and a wrap-up.