Is there any limit on stack memory?

c memory-management operating-system heap-memory stack-memory
Vikas picture Vikas · May 6, 2010 · Viewed 10k times · Source

I was going through one of the threads. A program crashed because it had declared an array of 10^6 locally inside a function.

Reason being given was memory allocation failure on stack leads to crash.

when same array was declared globally, it worked well.(memory on heap saved it).

Now for the moment, let us suppose, stack grows downward and heap upwards.

We have:

---STACK---

-------------------

---HEAP----

Now , I believe that if there is failure in allocation on stack, it must fail on heap too.

So my question is: is there any limit on stack size? (crossing the limit caused the program to crash). Or am I missing something?

Answer

Foxfire picture Foxfire · May 6, 2010

Yes, stack is always limited. In several languages/compilers you can set the requested size.

Usually default values (if not set manually) are about 1MB for current languages, which is enough unless you do something that usually isn't recommended (like you allocating huge arrays on the stack)

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