Efficient Incremental Garbage Collection for Workstation/Server Database Systems

We describe an efficient server-based algorithm for garbage collecting object-oriented databases in a workstation/server environment. The algorithm is incremental and runs concurrently with client transactions, however, it does not hold any locks on data and does not require callbacks to clients. It is fault tolerant, but performs very little logging. The algorithm has been designed to be integrated into existing OODB systems, and therefore it works with standard implementation techniques such as two-phase locking and write-ahead-logging. In addition, it supports client-server performance optimizations such as client caching and flexible management of client buffers. We describe an implementation of the algorithm in the EXODUS storage manager and present results from an initial performance study of the implementation. These results demonstrate that the introduction of the garbage collector adds minimal overhead to client operations . (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-94-121