If you have a problem at hand which does not really benefit from the presence of a garbage collector, switching to an implementation without a garbage collector has quite a potential to be at least somewhat faster. I remember myself to run onto this time trigger for garbage collection long in the past - though I don't remember why and mostly forgot about ever since until I read this article. As also written in the article, even if there are no allocations going on, Go forces a gc every two minutes, it is set here: https://golang.org/src/runtime/proc.go#L4268
The idea for this is (if I remember correctly) to be able to return unused memory to the OS. As returning memory requires a gc to run, it is forced in time intervals. I am a bit surprised that they didn't contact the corresponding Go developers, as they seem to be interested in practical use cases where the gc doesn't perform well. Besides that newer Go releases improved the gc performance, I am a bit surprised that they didn't just increase this time interval to an arbitrary large number and checked, if their issues went away.
Not only is there good potential for a speed improvement, but languages built around the assumption of pervasive garbage collection tend not to have good language constructs to support manual memory management.
To be fair, most languages without GCs also don't have good language constructs to support manual memory management. If you're going to make wide use of manual memory management, you should think very carefully about how the language and ecosystem you're using help or hinder your manual memory management.
The idea for this is (if I remember correctly) to be able to return unused memory to the OS. As returning memory requires a gc to run, it is forced in time intervals. I am a bit surprised that they didn't contact the corresponding Go developers, as they seem to be interested in practical use cases where the gc doesn't perform well. Besides that newer Go releases improved the gc performance, I am a bit surprised that they didn't just increase this time interval to an arbitrary large number and checked, if their issues went away.