Can a stack overflow happen for any other reason that recursion?

Question

I'm getting a stack overflow exception for a segment of code that doesn't seem to be able to produce a stackoverflow... It looks like this:

public String WriteToFile(XmlDocument pDoc, String pPath)
{
  string source = "";
  string seq = "";
  string sourcenet = "";

  XmlNodelist sourceNode = pDoc.GetElementsByTagName(XmlUtils.Nodes.Source);
  source = sourceNode.Item(0).InnerText;

  XmlNodelist sqList= pDoc.GetElementsByTagName(XmlUtils.Nodes.Seq);
  seq = sqList.Item(0).InnerText;

  XmlNodelist sourceNets = pDoc.GetElementsByTagName(XmlUtils.Nodes.SourceNets);
  sourcenet = sourceNets.Item(0).InnerText;

  string fileName = Folders.GetMyFileName(source, seq, sourcenet);
  string fullPath = Path.Combine(pPath, fileName);

  pDoc.Save(pFullPathFile);  <--- Stackoverflow is raised here

  return pFullPathFile; 
}

There are no recursive calls, if you examine the call stack it has a depth of 2 before going to "external code" (which I'm guessing is not that external but part of the framework that starts the thread, which has debugging turn off).

¿Is there anyway the exception can be risen because anything other than a recursive call? It does ALWAYS fails in the pDoc.Save method call... and pDoc isn't actually that big... more like 32KB of data...

Answer 1

A stack overflow exception can occur any time that the stack exceeds it's maximum size. This is mostly commonly done with by ...

• Having a deeply nested stack which is not recursive. Think of event storms where event A leads to event B which leads to event C all of which have handlers that deeply grow the stack.
• Having a shallow stack which occurs after some large stack allocations