Limitation on call stacks

2009-06-30T00:00:00-07:00

Fellow Yahoo! Nicholas Zakas has blogged about some browsers limitations and recently ran some tests in order to check browsers call stack sizes.

Not surprisingly, different browsers have different call stack sizes. Also not surprisingly, the method that they use to determine the call stack varies as well. The various call stack sizes I could measure are (give or take, might be off by 1 or 2):

Internet Explorer 7: 1,789

Firefox 3: 3,000

Chrome 1: 21,837

Opera 9.62: 10,000

Safari 3.2: 500 In each case, the browser will end up stopping your code and (hopefully) display a message about the issue:

Internet Explorer 7: “Stack overflow at line x”

Firefox 3: “Too much recursion”

Chrome 1: n/a

Opera 9.62: “Abort (control stack overflow)”

Safari 3.2: “RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded.”

We ran some tests ourselves in order to get the call stack sizes on other browsers/hosts/OSs using this simple code:

var i = 0;
 
function recurse () {
    i++;
    recurse();
}
 
try {
    recurse();
} catch (ex) {
    alert('i = ' + i + '\nerror: ' + ex);
}

And got some interesting numbers/errors results:

on Ubuntu 8.04:
stack sizes

Firefox 3.0.10: 3,000
Chromium 2.0.174.0~svn20090412r13572: 21,828
Rhino 1.4r2: 338
SpiderMonkey 1.7.0: 1,000

errors

Firefox 3.0.10: InternalError: too much recursion
Chromium 2.0.174.0~svn20090412r13572: RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
Rhino 1.4r2: js: exception from uncaught JavaScript throw: java.lang.StackOverflowError
SpiderMonkey 1.7.0: InternalError: too much recursion

on Windows XP SP3:
stack sizes

Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.5512 SP3: 2,541
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 2,555
Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702: 3,076
Firefox 2.0.0.20: 1,000
Firefox 3.0.10: 3,000
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4: 3,000
Chrome 2.0.172.31: 21,838
Safari 4 Public Beta (528.16): 43,688
Opera 9.64: n/a

errors

Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.5512 SP3: Error: Out of stack space
Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: Error: Out of stack space
Internet Explorer 8.0.6001.18702: Error: Out of stack space
Firefox 2.0.0.20: InternalError: too much recursion
Firefox 3.0.10: InternalError: too much recursion
Firefox 3.5 Beta 4: InternalError: too much recursion
Chrome 2.0.172.31: name: RangeError, type: stack_overflow, message: Maximum call stack size exceeded
Safari 4 Public Beta (528.16): RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
Opera 9.64: Abort (control stack overflow). Script terminated.

You can see this code live and running here.

JavaScript Rules - error

Limitation on call stacks