Birrell's Distributed Reference Listing Revisited
Moreau, Luc, Dickman, Peter and Jones, Richard (2004) Birrell's Distributed Reference Listing Revisited. Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems
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Description/Abstract
The Java RMI collector is arguably the most widely used distributed garbage collector. Its distributed reference listing algorithm was introduced by Birrell in the context of Network Objects, where the description was informal and heavily biased toward implementation. In this paper, we formalise this algorithm in an implementation-independent manner, which allows us to clarify weaknesses of the initial presentation. In particular, we discover cases critical to the correctness of the algorithm that are not accounted for by Birrell. We use our formalisation to derive an invariant-based proof of correctness of the algorithm that avoids notoriously difficult temporal reasoning. Furthermore, we offer a novel graphical representation of the state transition diagram, which we use to provide intuitive explanations of the algorithm and to investigate its tolerance to faults in a systematic manner. Finally, we examine how the algorithm may be optimised, either by placing constraints on message channels or by tightening the coupling between application program and distributed garbage collector.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Related URLs: | |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Physical and Applied Science > Electronics and Computer Science > Web & Internet Science |
| Item ID: | 259449 |
| Date Deposited: | 28 Jun 2004 |
| Last Modified: | 18 Aug 2012 03:32 |
| Contributors: | Moreau, Luc (Author) Dickman, Peter (Author) Jones, Richard (Author) |
| Date: | July 2004 |
| Status: | Published |
| Further Information: | Google Scholar |
| ISI Citation Count: | 1 |
| URI: | http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/259449 |
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