Recently, I was asked in an interview, why would you have a smaller stack when the available memory has no limit? Why would you have it in 1KB range even when you might have 4GB physical memory? Is this a standard design practice?
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Recently, I was asked in an interview, why would you have a smaller stack when the available memory has no limit? Why would you have it in 1KB range even when you might have 4GB physical memory? Is this a standard design practice?
The smaller your stacks, the more of them you can have. A 1kB stack is pretty useless, as I can’t think of an architecture that has pages that small. A more typical size is 128kB-1MB.
Since each thread has its own stack, the number of stacks you can have is an upper limit on the number of threads you can have. Some people complain about the fact that they can’t create more than 2000 threads in a standard 2GB address space of a 32-bit Windows process, so it’s not surprising that some people would want even smaller stacks to allow even more threads.
Also, consider that if a stack has to be completely reserved ahead of time, it is carving a chunk out of your address space that can’t be returned until the stack isn’t used anymore (i.e. the thread exits). That chunk of reserved address space then limits the size of a contiguous allocation you can make.