Experience with memory management in open Linda systems

Abstract

Coordination systems, in particular Linda, have established themselves as important tools for developing applications for open systems such as the Internet. This paper shows how to tackle a forgotten, yet crucial problem in open coordination systems: memory management. As with any system which intends to be of wide use, coordination systems have to address the problems of memory exhaustion since memory is a finite resource. This paper first explores the separation between coordination and computation in order to make it clear that the problem of memory exhaustion in coordination systems cannot be solved using garbage collection schemes implemented at the computation language — a garbage collection scheme must exist in the coordination environment as well. As Linda is arguably the most successful coordination system, this paper will focus on the Linda-like family of systems. By showing how the problem can be tackled in Linda it is expected that a solution for other coordination system could be implemented by adapting the method described.