Efficient garbage collection schemes for causal message logging with independent checkpointing

This paper presents three garbage collection schemes for causal message logging with independent checkpointing. The first scheme allows each process to autonomously remove useless log information in its volatile storage by piggybacking only some additional information without requiring any extra message and forced checkpoint. Additionally, it supports faster output commit than traditional schemes. The second scheme enables each process to remove a part of log information in the storage if more empty space is required. It reduces the number of processes participating in the garbage collection by using the size of the log information of each process. The third scheme is a hybrid scheme having the advantages of the two proposed schemes. Simulation results show that the third scheme significantly reduces the garbage collection overhead compared with the traditional schemes regardless of specific communication patterns of distributed applications.