Practical distributed garbage collection for networks with asynchronous clocks and message delay

Abstract

Distributed garbage collection over a message passage network is discussed in this paper. Traditionally, this can be done by reference counting, which is fast but cannot reclaim cyclic structures or by graph traversal, e.g. mark-and-sweep or time stamping, which is capable of reclaiming cyclic structures but is slow. We propose a combined scheme which is fast in reclaiming acyclic garbage and guaranteed to reclaim cyclic garbage. Our scheme does not rely on synchronized clocks nor zero message delay and is thus practical.