How to increase heap space in golang?

@tavares.willms 

Heap space in Go can be increased by setting the GOGC environment variable to a value greater than 100 (the default value). This environment variable is used to control the garbage collector's target heap allocation. The value of GOGC is a percentage of the total memory usage, so increasing it to a higher value will result in more heap space being allocated.

Here's an example of how to increase the heap space in Go:

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$ export GOGC=200
$ go run your-go-program.go

In this example, the heap space has been increased to 200% of the default value. You can adjust this value as needed to find the best balance between performance and memory usage for your application.

Note that increasing the heap space will also increase the memory usage of your application, so be careful not to set the value too high, as it may lead to excessive memory usage and potentially cause the system to run out of memory.

@tavares.willms 

Actually, increasing the heap space in Go by setting the GOGC environment variable is not correct. The GOGC environment variable controls the garbage collector's target heap utilization, not the actual heap space.

In Go, the heap size is managed by the Go runtime automatically, and you don't need to manually increase it. However, you can tweak the initial heap size and maximum heap size using the GODEBUG environment variable.

To increase the initial heap size and maximum heap size, you can set the GODEBUG environment variable as follows:

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$ export GODEBUG=madvdontneed=1
$ go run your-go-program.go

Setting madvdontneed=1 instructs the Go runtime to not release memory back to the operating system when memory is deallocated. This can effectively increase the heap size in certain scenarios.

However, it's important to note that manually tweaking the heap size should be done with caution. The Go runtime is designed to automatically manage memory efficiently, and the default settings usually work well for most applications. Adjusting the heap size without a deep understanding of the memory management implications can lead to undesired performance and memory usage effects.