Re: stack size

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Francesco Pietra <chiendarret@yahoo.com> writes:

> With amd 64 etch (NUMA 4 dual-opteron, 24 GB RAM, set with shmmax) it was suggested (for heavy calculations) to set 'stack size' to 'unlimited'.
>
> At each new boot, I do that with 
>
> $ ulimit -s unlimited
>
> thus changing the stack size from usual 8192 kbytes. If there is no drawback in setting 'stack size' to u'nlimited', how do set that permanently?
>
> Thanks
> francesco pietra

Who suggested such a thing? The only reason to change the stack limit
would be when you have some application that segfaults with a stack
overflow without that being a bug. The stack limit is helpfull in
catching programms running into an endless recursion early so I
wouldn't change it.

The drawback of an unlimited stack size is that a simple endless
recursion will eat up all your memory until the out-of-memory killer
gets triggered.

MfG
        Goswin