garbage collection in lindacap
LINDACAP provides a capability-based coordination for open distributed systems. As open systems are persistent, garbage collection (GC) can be a vital aspect in managing the systems' resources. Garbage collection has been proposed for the standard Linda to garbage collect tuple-spaces, but not selected tuples (data) within. In Lindacap, multicapabilities enable tuples to be uniquely referenced, and thus providing sufficient information on the usability of tuples (data) within the tuple-space. Therefore, garbage collection mechanism has been incorporated in Lindacap to remove unnecessary tuples. However, the implementation of garbage collection in Lindacap was based on reference counting: it does not garbage collect cyclic garbage. In this paper, garbage collection using the mark-and-sweep algorithm is implemented to remove cyclic garbage. In addition to this, a time-to-idle (TTI) technique is also proposed, which allows for garbage collection of multicapability regions that are being referred to by agents but are not used in a specified length of time. The performance results indicate that the incorporation of garbage collection techniques (mark-and-sweep and TTI) adds little overhead to the overall performance of the system. In addition, the difference between the average overhead caused by the mark-and-sweep and reference counting is small, and can be considered insignificant if the benefits brought by the mark-and-sweep is taken into account.
garbage collection multicapabilties linda coordination capabilities