Java stack overflow error - how to increase the stack size in Eclipse?

tree-hacker picture tree-hacker · Jan 24, 2010 · Viewed 150.3k times · Source

I am running a program that I've written in Java in Eclipse. The program has a very deep level of recursion for very large inputs. For smaller inputs the program runs fine however when large inputs are given, I get the following error:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StackOverflowError

Can this be solved by increasing the Java stack size and if so, how do I do this in Eclipse?

Update:

@Jon Skeet

The code is traversing a parse tree recursively in order to build up a datastructure. So, for example the code will do some work using a node in the parse tree and call itself on the node's two children, combining their results to give the overall result for the tree.

The total depth of the recursion depends on the size of the parse tree but the code seems to fail (without a larger stack) when the number of recursive calls gets into the 1000s.

Also I'm pretty sure the code isn't failing because of a bug as it works for small inputs.

Answer

Andreas Dolk picture Andreas Dolk · Jan 24, 2010

Open the Run Configuration for your application (Run/Run Configurations..., then look for the applications entry in 'Java application').

The arguments tab has a text box Vm arguments, enter -Xss1m (or a bigger parameter for the maximum stack size). The default value is 512 kByte (SUN JDK 1.5 - don't know if it varies between vendors and versions).