Funnily enough, something similar happened at Twitch regarding their API front end written in Go: https://blog.twitch.tv/en/2019/04/10/go-memory-ballast-how-i...
> The ballast in our application is a large allocation of memory that provides stability to the heap.
> As noted earlier, the GC will trigger every time the heap size doubles. The heap size is the total size of allocations on the heap. Therefore, if a ballast of 10 GiB is allocated, the next GC will only trigger when the heap size grows to 20 GiB. At that point, there will be roughly 10 GiB of ballast + 10 GiB of other allocations.
> For those interested, there is a proposal to add a target heap size flag to the GC which will hopefully make its way into the Go runtime soon.
What's wrong with the existing parameter?
I'm sure they aren't going this far to avoid all environment config without a good reason, but any good reason would be a flaw in some part of their stack.