> What I was curious about was applying a GC language to a use case that must have extremely low latency. It seems like an important consideration, as a GC pause in the middle of high-frequency trading could be problematic.
Regarding a run-time environment using garbage collection in general, not OCaml specifically, GC pauses can be minimized with parallel collection algorithms such as found in the JVM[0]. They do not provide hard guarantees however, so over-provisioning system RAM may also be needed in order to achieve required system performance.
Another more complex approach is to over-provision the servers such that each can drop out of the available pool for a short time, thus allowing "offline GC." This involves collaboration between request routers and other servers, so may not be worth the effort if a deployment can financially support over-provisioning servers such that there is always an idle CPU available for parallel GC on each.
Regarding a run-time environment using garbage collection in general, not OCaml specifically, GC pauses can be minimized with parallel collection algorithms such as found in the JVM[0]. They do not provide hard guarantees however, so over-provisioning system RAM may also be needed in order to achieve required system performance.
Another more complex approach is to over-provision the servers such that each can drop out of the available pool for a short time, thus allowing "offline GC." This involves collaboration between request routers and other servers, so may not be worth the effort if a deployment can financially support over-provisioning servers such that there is always an idle CPU available for parallel GC on each.
0 - https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/17/gctuning/parallel-...