Why reduce the size of the Java JVM thread stack?

Question

I was reading an article on handling Out Of Memory error conditions in Java (and on JBoss platform) and I saw this suggestion to reduce the size of the threadstack. Can anyone explain how "reducing" the size of threadstack will help with a max memory error condition?

http://community.jboss.org/wiki/OutOfMemoryExceptions

Answer 1

When Java creates a new thread, it pre-allocates a fixed-size block of memory for that thread's stack. By reducing the size of that memory block, you can avoid running out of memory, especially if you have lots of threads - the memory saving is the reduction in stack size times the number of threads.

The downside of doing this is that you increase the chance of a Stack Overflow error.

Note that the thread stacks are created outside of the JVM heap, so even if there's plenty of memory available in the heap, you can still fail to create a thread stack due to running out of memory (or running out of address space, as Tom Hawtin correctly points out).

Answer 2

There are N threads in a process, and M bytes of memory is allocated for each thread stack. Total memory allocated for stack usage is N x M.

You can reduce total memory consumed by the stack by reducing the number of threads (N), or reducing the memory allocated for each thread (M).

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Often a thread won't use all of the stack. It's pre-allocated "in case" it will be needed later, but if the thread doesn't use a deep call path, or doesn't use recursion, it may not need all of the stack space allocated on its behalf.

Finding the optimal stack size can be an art.

Answer 3

The problem exists on 32-bit JVMs were address space can get exhausted. Reducing the maximum stack size will not normally decrease the amount of memory actually allocated. Consider 8k threads with 256kB reserved for stack of 1k of 2MB, that's 31 bits of address space (2GB) gone there.

The problem all but disappears with 64-bit JVMs (although the actual amount of memory will increase a bit because references are twice as big). Alternatively, use of non-blocking APIs can remove the need for quite so many threads.

Answer 4

I would try other things (such as changing the survivor ratio or the size of space allocated for class definitions) before trying to change the thread stack size. It is hard to get it right, thus very easy to get a stack overflow error (which is equally fatal as an out of memory error.)

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I've never gotten this right even after careful examination. But then again, I might have never encountered a web application/container combination that could be fined-tuned by changing its thread stack size. I've had much better (and non-fatal) results modifying the survivor ratio. But that has been my work experience. In different workplaces and applications, YMMV.