Initializing a GC has almost no overhead (compared to e.g. loading some classes). The only reason to introduce this is to intentionally avoid overhead for having it actually reclaim memory under the assumption that it is in any case not going to ask for more than there is. This does not make sense for long running servers but could make sense for short running things like lambda functions, command line stuff etc. Of course if this overhead is substantial that probably means this is not a good solution since you apparently have a lot of memory allocation happening.