Microsoft® .NET Remoting

An Object’s Lease on Life

.NET Remoting uses a lease-based form of distributed garbage collection to manage the lifetime of remote objects. To understand the reasoning behind this choice of lifetime management systems, consider a situation in which many clients are communicating with a server-activated Singleton-mode remote object. Non-lease-based lifetime management schemes can use a combination of pinging and reference counting to determine when an object should be garbage collected. The reference count indicates the number of connected clients, while pinging ensures that the clients are still active. In this situation, the network traffic incurred by pinging might have adverse effects on the overall operation of the distributed application. ...