Collecting cyclic garbage in distributed systems

The proposed garbage collection scheme identifies and collects cycles of garbage scattered across several machines. The scheme identifies a garbage cycle by investigating: (a) whether the transitive closure of a given object form a cycle, and (b) whether objects in the transitive closure are referenced by objects outside the closure. The algorithm only traces objects in the transitive closure of the object suspected to be in a garbage cycle. Thus, compared to normal mark-sweep, the algorithm here has better satiability. In contrast to partly-mark-sweep, which marks objects in two rounds, this algorithm identifies garbage in one round. Thus, the algorithm here is more efficient in terms of speed. This algorithm does not interfere with the mutators´ operations. Unlike many other schemes, the algorithm here does not require an object to reserve any memory to hold the information for running the algorithm. Thus, a large amount of memory can be saved