Is the entire Xss (stack space) used for each Java thread?

Question

I am considering increasing the stack size to work around the StackOverflowError thrown by the regex library which does not appear to be on the plans for a fix.

Edit: Solution

• Stephen C's answer is probably the best answer to the problem, even if it is not an answer to the question. Although my string size was more than 4k already, I was still likely to eventually have the problem again during the lifetime of the product
• aioobe's answer is the best answer to the actual question, perhaps not the actual problem.
• Chris's answer is a very good idea. Edit: JRegex worked great!

Answer 1

Is the entire Xss (stack space) used for each Java thread?

According to this page, yes:

• increase the stack size for all threads in your application, by including -Xssnnm in the Java command line (where nn is the number of megabytes of stack space per thread);

You can however choose a larger stack size for a specific thread using the Thread(ThreadGroup group, Runnable target, String name, long stackSize) constructor.

Allocates a new Thread object so that it has target as its run object, has the specified name as its name, belongs to the thread group referred to by group, and has the specified stack size.

Note however that (according to documentation) the effect of the stackSize parameter, if any, is highly platform dependent and that the value of the stackSize parameter may have no effect whatsoever on some platforms.