How to stop GC in Golang

Go language is a modern high-level programming language popular for its efficient concurrent programming and good memory management. Go's memory management is completed by the Garbage Collector (GC). GC is a mechanism for automatically managing memory. Its main function is to detect and reclaim memory space that is no longer used to avoid memory leaks and other memory-related problems. In the Go language, the automated mechanism of GC eliminates the need for developers to manually manage memory, which can greatly improve development efficiency. However, in some cases, developers need to temporarily disable the GC and perform some special operations. In this article, we will learn how to stop GC in Golang.

Basic principles of Golang GC

In Golang, GC detects memory space that is no longer used and reclaims the memory it occupies. Specifically, GC will divide the entire memory into two parts: root objects and non-root objects, and then perform garbage collection on non-root objects. While the GC is running, it will pause the current Goroutine (a lightweight thread in concurrent programming in the Go language) until garbage collection is completed. Therefore, although GC can automatically manage memory, it will also bring certain performance overhead to the program.

How to stop Golang GC

In Golang, developers can manually trigger GC by calling the runtime.GC() function. However, in some cases (such as performance testing and memory analysis) we need to disable the GC. By default, disabling GC can be achieved by setting the GOMAXPROCS environment variable. The GOMAXPROCS environment variable is used to set the maximum number of concurrencies for the current program. When the value of GOMAXPROCS is 1, the program will run in a single CPU environment with GC disabled. In this mode, when the memory usage reaches a preset value (usually 2GB), the program will crash. Therefore, we need to adjust according to the actual situation.

In addition to the above methods, you can also set the GC percentage threshold by calling the runtime.SetGCPercent() function when the program is running. This function accepts an integer parameter that represents the maximum CPU percentage occupied by GC recycling. Setting this value to 0 disables the GC, and setting it to 100 causes the GC to use 100% of CPU resources for collections.

Summary

In Golang, GC is a mechanism for automated memory management that can avoid memory leaks and other memory-related problems. Although GC can improve development efficiency, in some cases, we need to temporarily disable it. The above describes two different methods of disabling GC, namely setting the GOMAXPROCS environment variable and calling the runtime.SetGCPercent() function. Developers should choose the method that best suits their needs in the actual situation. No matter which method is used, it should be noted that disabling GC may have an impact on the performance and reliability of the program and needs to be used with caution.

The above is the detailed content of How to stop GC in Golang. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!