Extending .NET Remoting with Distributed Garbage Collection

The memory management of distributed objects, when done manually, is an error-prone task. It leads to memory leaks and dangling references causing applications to fail. Avoiding such errors requires automatic memory management, named distributed garbage collection (DGC). Current DGC solutions are either not safe, not complete or not portable to widely used platforms such as .NET. As a matter of fact, most solutions either run on specialized environments or require modifications of the underlying virtual machine (e.g. Rotor) hindering its immediate utilization. This paper describes the architecture, implementation and performance measurements of a DGC algorithm that: i) is capable of reclaiming both acyclic and cyclic garbage, while ii) being portable in the sense that it does not require the underlying virtual machine to be modified. The distributed garbage collector was implemented on top of two realizations of the Common Language Infrastructure (.NET virtual machine specification): Common Language Runtime (CLR) and Shared Source CLI (SSCLI), commonly known as Rotor. The implementation requires no modification of the environment, it makes use of the aspect-oriented functionalities provided, and the preliminary results are encouraging.