Cost-based garbage collection scheduling in a distributed storage environment

In an embodiment, a partition cost of one or more of the plurality of partitions and a data block cost for one or more data blocks that may be subjected to a garbage collection operation are determined. The partition cost and the data block cost are combined into an overall reclaim cost by specifying both the partition cost and the data block cost in terms of a computing system latency. A byte constant multiplier that is configured to modify the overall reclaim cost to account for the amount of data objects that may be rewritten during the garbage collection operation may be applied. The one or more partitions and/or one or more data blocks that have the lowest overall reclaim cost while reclaiming an acceptable amount of data block space may be determined and be included in a garbage collection schedule.