The present invention consists of a new type of garbage collector, one that runs in a different process being scanned. With this method, the process being collected communicates its memory state ("a memory snapshot") to a garbage collecting process (GC), and the GC process scans the memory and sends...http://www.google.de/patents/US5355483?utm_source=gb-gplus-sharePatent US5355483 - Asynchronous garbage collection
