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>"It's interesting that many games can afford a constant 10x interpretation overhead for scripts, but not a spikey 1% for garbage collection."

Why is that surprising?

Games are basically about humans predicting things and random spikes prevent that from happening in time sensitive games. Beyond game play implications, I suspect there's also something about jerkiness in movement that bugs human senses.

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It's not entirely surprising, but one might imagine a different approach: always allocate a 1% buffer for an unexpected GC.

It's not a very satisfactory answer (and there are likely much better tradeoffs to be made), but given the 10x and 1% comparison (not entirely apples to apples though) the comment sounds a bit more interesting.

The problem is that with most GC algorithms 1% of the frames take 2x (or even 20x) as long, not that individual frame times vary by 1%.

How do you allocate a 1% buffer of time? The GC issue in games (or any other timing sensitive application) is about the "world freezing", not memory. Which is why incremental GC is a thing. At best, you're borrowing time.

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