Abstract
We present a distributed garbage collection algorithm that eventually collects all cycles in an open network. As with recent reference counting algorithms, it explicitly maintains the distributed inverse reference graph (i.e., each object maintains a list of sites known to have references to it). We show that a modified depth-first traversal of this inverse graph is sufficient to locate any garbage it contains. We also provide a heuristic to control the frequency of distributed collections. The inverse graph has other uses, such as maintaining distributed consistency, which makes it particularly useful in a network where cooperation is not assured.
This work was partly supported by ARPA Grant MDA972-91-J-1022
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© 1995 Springer-Verlag
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Fuchs, M. (1995). Garbage collection on an open network. In: Baler, H.G. (eds) Memory Management. IWMM 1995. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 986. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60368-9_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-60368-9_27
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