Efficient and Reliable Lock-Free Memory Reclamation Based on Reference Counting

Paper in proceedings, 2005

We present an efficient and practical lock-free implementation of a memory reclamation scheme based on reference counting, aimed for use with arbitrary lock-free dynamic data structures. The scheme guarantees the safety of local as well as global references, supports arbitrary memory reuse, uses atomic primitives which are available in modern computer systems and provides an upper bound on the memory prevented for reuse. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first lock-free algorithm that provides all of these properties. Experimental results indicate significant performance improvements for lock-free algorithms of dynamic data structures that require strong garbage collection support.