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The usual GC tradeoff is between memory and CPU performance. If you set the memory max high, the GC will run less often, you get less pause time.

So I do not understand why it's a surprise that minimizing the pause time requires more memory. Is it because there is no knob to set either the max pause time or the max memory ?

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Because people generally do not understand memory management, and by people I mean majority of programmers, leading to dumb tales about performance of GC vs RAII/manual or even glorifying RC

When GC runs less often, doesn't that rather increase the amount of things needed to be cleaned up _when_ GC finally runs? So actually the GC time _at that point_ should be longer, not shorter, while in total summed up, it should be shorter. Running GC often means cleaning up less stuff for every GC run, so the GC time for each run should be shorter.

Do I have any misconceptions?

I think you're right, based on screwing around with Flash's GC a couple decades ago. (Iirc, you could only really control it with the debug player.)

Depends on the GC. For some the amount of work is related just to live objects.

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