Thinking more about it, this <i>is</i> a fundamental weakness of having self-policing processes, which I suppose is the OP&#x27;s main point. It can be mitigated by having infinite lock TTLs, at the cost of risking system deadlock on process failure. Thank you to GPP for spurring me to think more deeply about this.<p>As I stated, though, if the resource being protected is either a distributed system itself, or a system that cannot support fencing logic, this failure mode is difficult or impossible to prevent. The frequency of failure should be kept in mind here: most services can probably guarantee 99.99% uptime against the likelihood of 5 minute GC pauses.