why is stack memory size so limited?
When you allocate memory on the heap, the only limit is free RAM (or virtual memory). It makes Gb of memory.
So why is stack size so limited (around 1 Mb) ? What technical reason prevents you to create really big objects on the stack ?
Update : My intent might not be clear, I do not want to allocate huge objects on the stack and I do not need a bigger stack. This question is just pure curiosity.
My intuition is the following. The stack is not as easy to manage as the heap. The stack need to be stored in continuous memory locations. This means that you cannot randomly allocate the stack as needed, but you need to at least reserve virtual addresses for that purpose. The larger the size of the reserved virtual address space, the fewer threads you can create.
For example, a 32-bit application generally has a virtual address space of 2GB. This means that if the stack size is 2MB (as default in pthreads), then you can create a maximum of 1024 threads. This can be small for applications such as web servers. Increasing the stack size to, say, 100MB (ie, you reserve 100MB, but do not necessarily allocated 100MB to the stack immediately), would limit the number of threads to about 20, which can be limiting even for simple GUI applications.
A interesting question is, why do we still have this limit on 64-bit platforms. I do not know the answer, but I assume that people are already used to some "stack best practices": be careful to allocate huge objects on the heap and, if needed, manually increase the stack size. Therefore, nobody found it useful to add "huge" stack support on 64-bit platforms.
One aspect that nobody has mentioned yet:
A limited stack size is an error detection and containment mechanism.
Generally, the main job of the stack in C and C++ is to keep track of the call stack and local variables, and if the stack grows out of bounds, it is almost always an error in the design and/or the behaviour of the application.
If the stack would be allowed to grow arbitrarily large, these errors (like infinite recursion) would be caught very late, only after the operating systems resources are exhausted. This is prevented by setting an arbitrary limit to the stack size. The actual size is not that important, apart from it being small enough to prevent system degradation.
It is just a default size. If you need more, you can get more - most often by telling the linker to allocate extra stack space.
The downside to having large stacks is that if you create many threads, they will need one stack each. If all the stacks are allocating multi-MBs, but not using it, the space will be wasted.
You have to find the proper balance for your program.
Some people, like @BJovke, believe that virtual memory is essentially free. It is true that you don't need to have physical memory backing all the virtual memory. You do have to be able to at least give out addresses to the virtual memory.
However, on a typical 32-bit PC the size of the virtual memory is the same as the size of the physical memory - because we only have 32 bits for any address, virtual or not.
Because all threads in a process share the same address space, they have to divide it between them. And after the operating system has taken its part, there is "only" 2-3 GB left for an application. And that size is the limit for both the physical and the virtual memory, because there just aren't any more addresses.
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