An in-memory storage manager represents XML-compliant documents as a collection of objects in memory. The storage manager allows real-time access to the objects by separate processes operating in different contexts. The data in the objects is stored in memory local to each process and the local memories are synchronized by means of a distributed memory system that stores the data in the same data region, but maps the data region to the address space of each process. Data corruption in the data region is prevented by a locking mechanism that prevents the processes from simultaneously modifying same data.