3.3 Garbage Collection of Remote Objects

In a distributed system, just as in the local system, it is desirable to automatically delete those remote objects that are no longer referenced by any client. This frees the programmer from needing to keep track of the remote objects' clients so that it can terminate appropriately. RMI uses a reference-counting garbage collection algorithm similar to Modula-3's Network Objects. (See "Network Objects" by Birrell, Nelson, and Owicki, Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center Technical Report 115, 1994.)

To accomplish reference-counting garbage collection, the RMI runtime keeps track of all live references within each Java virtual machine. When a live reference enters a Java virtual machine, its reference count is incremented. The first reference to an object sends a "referenced" message to the server for the object. As live references are found to be unreferenced in the local virtual machine, the count is decremented. When the last reference has been discarded, an unreferenced message is sent to the server. Many subtleties exist in the protocol; most of these are related to maintaining the ordering of referenced and unreferenced messages in order to ensure that the object is not prematurely collected.

When a remote object is not referenced by any client, the RMI runtime refers to it using a weak reference. The weak reference allows the Java virtual machine's garbage collector to discard the object if no other local references to the object exist. The distributed garbage collection algorithm interacts with the local Java virtual machine's garbage collector in the usual ways by holding normal or weak references to objects.

As long as a local reference to a remote object exists, it cannot be garbage-collected and it can be passed in remote calls or returned to clients. Passing a remote object adds the identifier for the virtual machine to which it was passed to the referenced set. A remote object needing unreferenced notification must implement the java.rmi.server.Unreferenced interface. When those references no longer exist, the unreferenced method will be invoked. unreferenced is called when the set of references is found to be empty so it might be called more than once. Remote objects are only collected when no more references, either local or remote, still exist.

Note that if a network partition exists between a client and a remote server object, it is possible that premature collection of the remote object will occur (since the transport might believe that the client crashed). Because of the possibility of premature collection, remote references cannot guarantee referential integrity; in other words, it is always possible that a remote reference may in fact not refer to an existing object. An attempt to use such a reference will generate a RemoteException which must be handled by the application.