I've been told that garbage collection techniques don't work when objects are shared in a distributed enviornment.
Is this the case?
It seems like there should be ways in which networked objects are GC'd as part of the vending mechanism.
ab
__ Adam Bridge Idea Processing
Adam Bridge wrote:
I've been told that garbage collection techniques don't work when objects are shared in a distributed enviornment.
Is this the case?
It seems like there should be ways in which networked objects are GC'd as part of the vending mechanism.
It depends on how your distributed enviroment works. If you have proxies for objects. And the proxy is garbage collected on Server A it has to inform the proxy on the other Server B, because this proxy may hold references to other objects. This can result in a lot of communication between the servers.
Other problems in distributed enviroments are that sometimes servers may be down or not reachable.
So distributed GC is not that easy ...
Markus
Adam Bridge wrote:
I've been told that garbage collection techniques don't work when objects are shared in a distributed enviornment.
Is this the case?
It seems like there should be ways in which networked objects are GC'd as part of the vending mechanism.
The text "Garbage Collection" by Richard Jones and Rafael Lins has a chapter (12) in it that talks about distributed garbage collection for about 20 pages. It's not impossible, but it adds additional difficulties. Basically what it comes down to though, is that the work/research just hasn't been done yet (relative to the amount of work/years that have been spent on garbage collection for single systems).
-- Travis Griggs Key Technology tgriggs@keyww.com To Smalltalk! - and Beyond!
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