[Boost-users] boost serialize - stack overflow for large problems

Subject: [Boost-users] boost serialize - stack overflow for large problems
From: Jörg F. Unger (j-unger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-09-28 10:49:47

  I have implemented the serialization routine for a rather complex 
structure with many nested classes. The serialization seems to work for 
small examples, however, for bigger data sets, I get a stack overflow 
error. If I increase the stack size from 8MB to 20MB, the examples seems 
to work. However, I'd like to optimize the code the way that I do not 
need to increase the stack size (especially, since not all users can do 
that themselves)

So here are my questions:
1. Why is the required stack size different for different data sets 
different. The structure of the datasets is identical, only the number 
of data sets differs - so why is the recursive level different? The only 
thing I can imagine is, that I have a class (container) with a vector of 
objects. Each object stores a pointer to the container class. Is it 
possible that once serialization in the container class starts, that 
there is a recursive serialization pattern? This seems to be support by 
the fact that the objects in the container class are not serialized in 
the same way as they are stored in the container.

class container
{
std::vector<object*> myObjects;
};

class object
{
const container* myContainer;
}

2. How can I try to decrease the required stack size for the 
serialization routines and is there a way to estimate the required stack 
size for a specific problem a priori, so that I can throw an exception 
with an error message manually instead of having a segmentation fault.

Thanks for any suggestions
JFU