Garbage collection in a distributed object-oriented system

An algorithm for garbage collection in distributed systems with object sharing across processor boundaries is described. The algorithm allows local garbage collection at each node in the system to proceed independently of local collection at the other nodes. It requires no global synchronization or knowledge of the global state of the system and exhibits the capability for graceful degradation. The concept of a specialized dump node is proposed to facilitate the collection of inaccessible circular structures. An experimental evaluation of the algorithm is also described. The algorithm is compared with a corresponding scheme that requires global synchronization. The results show that the algorithm works well in distributed processing environments even when the locality of object references is low