Distributed garbage collection

Distributed garbage collection (DGC) in computing is a particular case of garbage collection where references to an object can be held by a remote client.

DGC uses some combination of the classical garbage collection (GC) techniques, tracing and reference counting. It has to cooperate with local garbage collectors in each process in order to keep global counts, or to globally trace accessibility of data. In general, remote processors do not have to know about internal counting or tracing in a given process, and the relevant information is stored in interfaces associated with each process.