What is the default stack size can it grow how does it work with garbage collection

Question

I understand that each thread has its own stack  Primitive types and references are kept on the stack  and that no object is kept on the stack    My questions are    How much can a stack grow   like with the paramters -Xms and -Xmx  Can we limit its growth   Does the stack have a default minimum value and maximum value  How does garbage collection work on the stack

User · Accepted Answer

How much a stack can grow  You can use a VM option named ss to adjust the maximum stack size  A VM option is usually passed using -X option   So you can use java -Xss1M to set the maximum of stack size to 1M  Each thread has at least one stack  Some Java Virtual Machines JVM  put Java stack Java method calls  and native stack Native method calls in VM  into one stack  and perform stack unwinding using a Managed to Native Frame  known as M2NFrame  Some JVMs keep two stacks separately  The Xss set the size of the Java Stack in most cases  For many JVMs  they put different default values for stack size on different platforms  Can we limit this growth  When a method call occurs  a new stack frame will be created on the stack of that thread  The stack will contain local variables  parameters  return address  etc  In java  you can never put an object on stack  only object reference can be stored on stack  Since array is also an object in java  arrays are also not stored on stack  So  if you reduce the amount of your local primitive variables  parameters by grouping them into objects  you can reduce the space on stack  Actually  the fact that we cannot explicitly put objects on java stack affects the performance some time cache miss   Does stack has some default minimum value or default maximum value  As I said before  different VMs are different  and may change over versions  See here  how does garbage collection work on stack  Garbage collections in Java is a hot topic  Garbage collection aims to collect unreachable objects in the heap  So that needs a definition of  reachable   Everything on the stack constitutes part of the root set references in GC  Everything that is reachable from every stack of every thread should be considered as live  There are some other root set references  like Thread objects and some class objects  This is only a very vague use of stack on GC  Currently most JVMs are using a generational GC  This article gives brief introduction about Java GC  And recently I read a very good article talking about the GC on  net  The GC on oracle jvm is quite similar so I think that might also help you

User · Answer

As you say  local variables and references are stored on the stack  When a method returns  the stack pointer is simply moved back to where it was before the method started  that is  all local data is  removed from the stack   Therefore  there is no garbage collection needed on the stack  that only happens in the heap   To answer your specific questions    See this question on how to increase the stack size  You can limit the stack growth by    grouping many local variables in an object  that object will be stored in the heap and only the reference is stored on the stack limit the number of nested function calls  typically by not using recursion   For windows  the default stack size is 320k for 32bit and 1024k for 64bit  see this link

[java] What is the default stack size, can it grow, how does it work with garbage collection?

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