I'll repeat what was mentioned elsewhere. The GC pauses in Go are in the order of microseconds. We've done a ton of work keeping our memory usage under tight bounds and keeping a close eye on exactly how the go GC processes interplay with query execution threads (what processors are consumed, GC pressure buildup, where/when the stalls are introduced, etc.) Consistently we've found that given you're invariably dealing with network latencies (it's a distributed db after all), the microsecond GC pauses are almost entirely dwarfed to matter (I'm not excluding p99s here).