I seem to recall this being a problem on TorqueBox for some reason as well. It's possible TorqueBox handles it by setting an option on its own. Or I could just be making all of this up.

@bbrowning Does any of this sound familiar?

And now that I've commented this quickly, I realize this is in the launcher and TorqueBox has its own. Sorry for the noise.

@bbrowning If there's a test case that would fail if stack is too small, it might be interesting to try it with default stack size again.

I'm less gun-ho on this one because the worst it does now is make threads twice as large in memory, to the tune of a measly 1MB per. Unless you're running some 100-way machine that's not likely to matter much. It would just be nice to trim the fat in our launchers.

How much does our stack depth change once we turn this off? I am sure that depends on inlining and stuff like that but we did have some simple how deep script committed somewhere.

I ran some numbers.

All on Java 8u60, with the following code:

def foo(a)
  if a > 0
    foo(a - 1)
  else
    puts :success
  end
end
foo(N)

Here's interpreter. In 9.1 it is only the simple interpreter.

And with normal jit settings:

This difference in 9.1 is a bit of a worry. The interpreter seems about the same (I'd hope it would be better, even though this is a simple AST). The compiler is significantly worse. A general reason for this may be additional frames around our IR interpreted and compiled paths that could be collapsed. The compiler may suffer from invokedynamic "lambda forms" bloating the stack for early calls.

In any case, I don't think we're going to be able to drop the flag any time soon. I will open a separate bug for the poor stack depths in 9.1.