Papers › NBR: Neutralization Based Reclamation
NBR: Neutralization Based Reclamation
Ajay Singh, Trevor Brown, Ali Mashtizadeh
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Safe memory reclamation (SMR) algorithms suffer from a trade-off between bounding unreclaimed memory and the speed of reclamation. Hazard pointer (HP) based algorithms bound unreclaimed memory at all times, but tend to be slower than other approaches. Epoch based reclamation (EBR) algorithms are faster, but do not bound memory reclamation. Other algorithms follow hybrid approaches, requiring special compiler or hardware support, changes to record layouts, and/or extensive code changes. Not all SMR algorithms can be used to reclaim memory for all data structures. We propose a new neutralization based reclamation (NBR) algorithm that is faster than the best known EBR algorithms and achieves bounded unreclaimed memory. It is non-blocking when used with a non-blocking operating system (OS) kernel, and only requires atomic read, write and CAS. NBR is straightforward to use with many different data structures, and in most cases, require similar reasoning and programmer effort to two-phased locking. NBR is implemented using OS signals and a lightweight handshaking mechanism between participating threads to determine when it is safe to reclaim a record. Experiments on a lock-based binary search tree and a lazy linked list show that NBR significantly outperforms many state of the art reclamation algorithms. In the tree NBR is faster than next best algorithm, DEBRA by upto 38% and HP by upto 17%. And, in the list NBR is 15% and 243% faster than DEBRA and HP, respectively.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections