Comment by pron

I have no idea what it's using its CPU on, whether it has anything to do with memory management, or what memory management algorithm is in use. Obviously, the GC doesn't need to do any compaction if the program isn't allocating, and the program can only allocate if it's actually doing some computation. Also, I don't know the ratio of live set to total heap. A tracing GC needs to do very little work if most of the heap is garbage (i.e. the ration of live set to the total memory is low), but any form of memory management - tracing or manual - needs to do a lot of work if the ratio is low. Remember, a tracing-moving GC doesn't spend any cycles on garbage; it spends cycles on live objects only. The more heap you give it (assuming the same allocation rate and live set), means more garbage and less CPU consumption (as GC cycles are less frequent).

All you know is that CPU is exhausted before the RAM is, which, if anything, means that it may have been useful for Chrome to use more RAM (and reduce the liveset-to-heap ratio) to reduce CPU utilisation, assuming this CPU consumption has anything to do with memory management.

There is no situation in which, given the same allocation rate and live set, adding more heap to a tracing GC makes it work more. That's why in the talk he says that a DIMM is a hardware accelerator for memory management if you have a tracing-moving collector: increase the heap and voila, less CPU is spent on memory management.

That's why tracing-moving garbage collection is a great choice for any program that spends a significant amount of CPU on memory management, because then you can reduce that work by adding more RAM, which is cheaper than adding more CPU (assuming you're running on a machine that isn't RAM-constrained, like small embedded devices).