Is the garbage collector in Go blocking or non-blocking? Is its effect noticeable in production?

The garbage collector (GC) in Go is partially blocking. Modern versions of Go use a concurrent, tri-phase GC that minimizes pauses, but they cannot be completely avoided.

In production, the effect of GC is usually imperceptible with proper tuning and code optimization, but with large allocation volumes or improper memory management, pauses can become noticeable and affect latency.

To minimize the impact of GC, it is recommended to:

• reduce the number of allocations;
• use object pools;
• profile the application and optimize hot spots.

Example: if the application frequently creates and destroys objects, GC will run more often, causing small pauses.