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Asked: 2026-06-02T00:38:45+00:00

I have a recursive function which calls itself a very large number of times

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I have a recursive function which calls itself a very large number of times given certain inputs – which is exactly what it should do. I know my function isn’t infinitely looping – it just gets to a certain number of calls and overflows. I want to know if this is a problem with putting too much memory on the stack, or just a normal restriction in number of calls. Obviously it’s very hard to say a specific number of calls which is the maximum, but can anybody give me a rough estimate of the order of magnitude? Is it in the thousands? Hundreds? Millions?

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  1. Editorial Team

    It completely depends on how much information you use on the stack. However, the default stack on Windows is 1MB and the default stack on Unix is 8MB. Simply making a call can involve pushing a few 32bit registers and a return address, say, so you could be looking at maybe 20bytes a call, which would put the maximum at about 50k on Windows and 400k on Unix- for an empty function.

    Of course, as far as I’m aware, you can change the stack size.

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