How to increase memory allocation to program

Question

When I try to initialize a 3D array of size 300*300*4 in a C program, my program stops running and reports stack overflow error. The system I am using has 3GB RAM, which should be sufficeint. Is there any way to increase memory allocated to a program? I am using Dev C++ on Windows Vista.

Answer 1

Either use malloc()/free() (or new[]/delete[] for C++), or a global array, or a local static array. If you try to create a non-static array within a function, it gets allocated on the stack and stacks are generally not very large.

You can also try initialising the array backwards; some OSs grow the stack dynamically as page faults occur, and since on x86 the stack grows numerically downwards, initialising backwards can help.

Answer 2

You need to increase how much stack space your program can use.

You can set the maximum stack size in the properties dialog under to "Linker | System | Stack Reserve Size"