Speculative caching of individual fields in a distributed object system

This disclosure presents a technique of field-level caching in distributed object-oriented systems, in which a speculative approach is taken to identify opportunities for caching. The speculative approach is particularly suitable for exploitation of opportunities for caching. Invalidation protocols, which are fully compliant with the Java memory model, are provided to recover from incorrect speculation, while incurring only a low overhead. The technique has been implemented on a cluster of machines, and has been found to be readily scalable with multi-threaded applications. Field caching, optionally combined with other optimizations, produces a practically important performance step up in distributed environments, such as the cluster virtual machine for Java, which transparently distributes an application's threads and objects among the nodes of a cluster.