Experience with a Fault-Tolerant Garbage Collector in a Distributed List System

In order to evaluate our fault-tolerant distributed garbage collection protocol, we have built a prototype implementation within a distributed Lisp system, Transpive, replacing Piquer's native indirect reference count distributed garbage collector. This paper presents our protocol and highlights implementation issues on Transpive. In particular, we describe the prototype and the alterations required to fit into the Transpive distributed programming model. The message and CPU performance of our protocol are measured and its fault-tolerance evaluated. We conclude that the cost of our protocol is close to Piquers's, although our protocol has greater functionality.

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