Sketch based Distributed Garbage Collection, Theory and Empirical Elements

Joannès Vermorel (1)

1 CBIO - Centre de Bioinformatique

Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) is a pillar of actual, and most probably future, software engineering. Within the advances for OOP, Garbage Collection (GC) is one the major improvements that brought both large productivity and reliability benefits. Yet, to our knowledge, no widely used distributed systems benefit from a complete Distributed Garbage Collector (DGC) at this time. We believe that this situation is due, a least partly, to actual DGC performance issues. In this paper, we introduce the idea of sketch based DGC where object-graph fragments are sketched rather than explicitly represented. We prove, under reasonable assumptions that sketched messages are smaller up to one order of magnitude than their explicit counterparts. Those results apply to most of state-of-art DGC methods. In the case of the Veiga and Ferreira DGC algorithm, the improvement is more than a factor~4 under very limited assumptions.

Mots clés: sketch; unique identifiers; cycle detection; cyclic; DCDA; garbage collection; distributed garbage collection; DGC

Domaines: Algorithme et structure de données [cs.DS]; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]; Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Joannès Vermorel. Sketch based Distributed Garbage Collection, Theory and Empirical Elements. 2005. ⟨hal-00013011v5⟩