Question about our default pthread stack size

[Daniel Eischen]

On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:

> Daniel Eischen wrote:
> | The thing I worry about is these piggy applications being the
> | driving force behind our stack size.  If they really are designed
> | to need a huge stack size, they should be the ones that change
> | to support it, not the other way around.  Do they know their own
> | stack space requirements or do they just ignore it because it
> | isn't a problem so far (on Linux)?
>
> The bottom line is that they don't know their stack requirements, but
> the OS is accommodating, so they never have to really find out until we
> submit a bug to them.  However, some applications (e.g. gstreamer,
> libgnomecups, etc.) cannot be fixed without massive architectural
> changes.  Just to be clear, these applications _are_ overrunning the
> default stack.

FYI, I don't suggest they change their stack usage, just that
they create threads with thread attributes specifying a larger
stack size.  If they recognize they have large stack space
requirements, it should be easily solved without an architectural
overhaul.  I assume your patches do exactly this; are the GNOME
developers reluctant to incorporate your patches?

I'm not going to argue very strongly against changing the
default stack size.  I just think the onus should be on
the larger applications to recognize that they need larger
stacks and to explicitly set it.  There may also be other
applications that create a lot of threads which may need
to lower the stack size if the default were changed.

-- 
DE