Forum_account wrote:

Does the time reported by the world profile include time spent on garbage collection?

If the operation involved triggers some objects to fall out of scope and get collected, then yes, it should. Not all garbage collection will be caught during procs though, as it is possible for an object to fall out of scope in other ways.

I'm seeing some profiler times that look strangely high. The only thing I can figure is that list operations are slow or they are causing the garbage collector to run a lot, but I'm not sure if the GC time is counted there.

Hard to say without knowing more about the routines involved. Technically what would be happening wouldn't be so much the garbage collector running as just regular deallocation; full garbage collection would be a much bigger deal. Depending on what's deallocated though, it could have an impact on many things causing many deallocations to trigger.

Forum_account wrote:

I don't have the numbers handy but it seems like calling a proc that returns a list extends the parent proc's execution time by more than the child's running time - my guess was because it returns a list which goes out of scope when the parent ends and has to be cleaned up.

That's a plausible guess, though the time to recover a list should be fairly inconsequential unless it has a lot of objects in it that also fall out of scope (or, it's very very long). Deleting a list will DecRefCount anything in its contents and calling that routine even for numbers and nulls will have some small impact, though realistically not very much. If the routine is called very frequently and/or the lists are big though, those calls could add up even if they are minor.