Opportunistic clearing of sync states associated with a database

A system for managing the metadata of a database, said system comprising:

• a provider, said provider further comprising a processor and memory;
• a database, said database in communication with said provider and said provider is capable of maintaining a list of changes to said database and said provider is further capable of adding a tombstone for a data deleted from said database, said tombstone added to said list of changes to said database;
• wherein said provider is in communications with a set of consumers, said consumers requesting to sync with said database;
• and said provider is capable of maintaining a list of said consumers;
• and
• further wherein said provider is capable of deleting said tombstone when all consumers have been made aware of said deletion of said data.

A computer readable storage medium that is not a transient signal, said computer readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions stored thereon that, when executed by a processor, cause said processor to execute:

• a method for managing the allocation of a plurality of memory elements stored within one or more lockless list structures, said lockless list structures accessible within an operating system environment of a multicore processor, the steps of said method comprising the step of:
• maintaining a list of changes to said database, said changes associated with a sync token;
• maintaining a list of consumers of said database, said list of consumers associated with a last sync token for each said consumer;
• adding a tombstone to said list of changes when data is deleted from said database, said tombstone having its associated sync token in said list of changes;
• reading a request for sync from one of said consumers;
• updating said one of said consumers with metadata added to said list of changes to said database since said last sync token;
• and
• if all consumers have been updated with said sync token associated with said tombstone, deleting said tombstone from said list of changes to said database.