One data point from the Prodfiler folks was that even if the GC cost to throughput is relatively low, some programs will still spend up to 25% of their time doing garbage collection. This will show up on your cloud bill even if it doesn’t show up to that extent in your performance analysis.
I expect you can find papers giving numbers in the same ballpark for malloc/free, too. A MVP of JavaScript, for example, that boxes everything, combined with a benchmark that creates a d destroys lots of objects.
