I consider tens of milliseconds to be a long pause time (P99 should be <10ms), which is what I understand to be the ballpark for G1 (I haven't tested 17+). No doubt JVM is a fine piece of engineering, but I prefer Go's approach of just not allocating as much to begin with (Java's cheap allocations require a moving GC, which introduces challenges with respect to rewriting pointers and so on, which in turn introduces constraints for FFI and makes the whole system more complex). I wish it went further and made allocations more explicit.