Stack limit#
When developing programming competition problems locally, it's often the case we hit the stack limit configured in our system.
This is usually a problem because in modern online judges, the stack limit is configured to be as large as 256 MiB, but often the default configuration for Unix-like systems is way smaller than that.
The disparity can usually cause some friction, because it's really hard to identify that a solution crashed because it exceeded the stack limit, and not because of some other reason. Thus, it's usually a good practice to increase the stack limit as much as possible to avoid the problem.
You can check your current stack limit by running ulimit -s in your terminal. Also, you can check even more details about resource limits by running sudo launchctl limit on MacOS or ulimit -a -S/ulimit -a -H on Linux, which will show something like this:
# Output of `ulimit -a` on Linux
-t: cpu time (seconds) unlimited
-f: file size (blocks) unlimited
-d: data seg size (kbytes) unlimited
-s: stack size (kbytes) 8192
-c: core file size (blocks) 0
-v: address space (kbytes) unlimited
-l: locked-in-memory size (kbytes) unlimited
-u: processes 2666
-n: file descriptors 1048575
The values for ulimit -a -S indicates the soft limit -- in this example, 8 MiB --, and the values for ulimit -a -H indicates a hard limit. Usually, hard limits are a bit hard to configure, but soft limits can be easily increased to match the hard limit through the ulimit command.
Note
8 MiB is a really small and dangerous stack limit: it's not uncommon for a DFS with a handful of parameters in a big graph to exceed that limit. On the other hand, 64 MiB is usually enough for most problems.
Increase the soft stack limit#
To increase the stack limit to the maximum allowed (which will match the hard limit), you can run:
To ensure you're not bitten by this issue so easily, rbx will complain if you try to run code while your soft stack limit is less than your hard stack limit.
Do not worry, the fix -- which consists of adding some lines to your .bashrc (or the equivalent for other shells) -- is really simple and will be shown along the error message.
Tip
You should ensure the lines added to the file are definitely after the lines where pipx paths are added to $PATH$, otherwise the rbx command will not be found.
Increase the hard stack limit#
Sometimes, the hard stack limit is also too small. In this case, you can increase the hard stack limit in different ways depending on your system.
On Linux#
Open /etc/security/limits.conf and add the following lines:
This configuration should persist after a reboot.
On MacOS#
Run the following command in your terminal:
This configuration will NOT persist after a reboot, but will persist across terminals.