[Python-Dev] [ python-Patches-876206 ] scary frame speed hacks

[Jeremy Hylton]

On Tue, 2004-03-02 at 12:17, Bob Ippolito wrote:
> Well it's already true to some small extent because of the recursion 
> depth limit.  Though, this has only been a problem for me once, and I 
> rewrote it as a large ugly iterative version.

Don't know the particulars, but I thought it worth mentioning that the
recursion limit is set fairly conservatively.  In many cases, it's
possible to boost the recursion limit.  I don't know if it's ever
practical, because if something goes wrong you get a segfault.

Different kinds of recursive Python calls generated different numbers of
C stack frames.  So if you have a recursive __repr__(), it will consume
more C stack than a simple Python function.

Python's recursion limit is set to 1000 in 2.3.  On my box (RH9) the
first crash I get is with a recursion limit of 5800.  It blows up on the
repr case.  For simple recursive functions, I can push it all the way up
to 21,500.

Jeremy