A key mechanism of a persistent programming language is its ability to detect and handle references to non-resident objects. Ideally, this mechanism should be hidden from the programmer, allowing the transparent manipulation of all data regardless of its potential lifetime. We term such a mechanism object faulting, in a deliberate analogy with page faulting in virtual memory systems. This paper presents a number of mechanisms for detecting and handling references to persistent objects, and

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... ates their relative performance within an implementation of Persistent Smalltalk.