Since referencing objects refresh their target objects before expiration times, objects can receive refresh messages from all referencing objects. Since messages necessary for cyclic garbage collection are bundled with the messages used for timeouts, the overhead of cyclic garbage collection is minimized. The mechanism scales well in terms of the number of distributed objects due to the two optimization techniques of the refreshing mechanism. No extra messages are necessary for cyclic garbage collection because messages needed for cyclic garbage collection are bundled with refresh messages. The latency time to collect garbage increases in proportion to the length of the garbage chain, which is scalable.
All garbage including distributed cyclic garbage is reclaimed.
Our mechanism does not require global synchronization of all distributed systems. We expect that our garbage collection mechanism will work well for distributed persistent object systems. Andrew Birrel, David Evers, Greg Nelson, Susan Owicki and Edward Wobber, Distributed garbage collection for network objects , Technical Report 116, Digital Equipment Cooperation Systems Research Center, December 15, 1993. Common Object Services Specification , July 1997. 26, June 1983, pages 419-429.