Abstract: The disclosure relates to technology for reference counting. A global reference counter associated with a lock to count one or more threads of a process referencing an object allocated in the memory is established. Each reference to the object by a thread is then tracked using a corresponding local reference counter. The global reference counter is updated whenever a reference to the object by each of the one or more threads is an initial reference or a final reference. Otherwise, local counters are used to track a local reference count of the object.