Stackoverflow exception when traversing BST

Question

I have implement a link-based BST (binary search tree) in C++ for one of my assignment. I have written my whole class and everything works good, but my assignment asks me to plot the run-times for:

a.  A sorted list of 50000, 75000, and 100000 items
b.  A random list of 50000, 75000, and 100000 items

That's fine, I can insert the numbers but it also asks me to call the FindHeight() and CountLeaves() methods on the tree. My problem is that I've implemented the two functions using recursion. Since I have a such a big list of numbers I'm getting getting a stackoverflow exception.

Here's my class definition:

template <class TItem>
class BinarySearchTree
{
public:
    struct BinarySearchTreeNode
    {
    public:
        TItem Data;
        BinarySearchTreeNode* LeftChild;
        BinarySearchTreeNode* RightChild;
    };

    BinarySearchTreeNode* RootNode;

    BinarySearchTree();
    ~BinarySearchTree();

    void InsertItem(TItem);

    void PrintTree();
    void PrintTree(BinarySearchTreeNode*);

    void DeleteTree();
    void DeleteTree(BinarySearchTreeNode*&);

    int CountLeaves();
    int CountLeaves(BinarySearchTreeNode*);

    int FindHeight();
    int FindHeight(BinarySearchTreeNode*);

    int SingleParents();
    int SingleParents(BinarySearchTreeNode*);

    TItem FindMin();
    TItem FindMin(BinarySearchTreeNode*);

    TItem FindMax();
    TItem FindMax(BinarySearchTreeNode*);
};

FindHeight() Implementation

template <class TItem>
int BinarySearchTree<TItem>::FindHeight()
{
    return FindHeight(RootNode);
}

template <class TItem>
int BinarySearchTree<TItem>::FindHeight(BinarySearchTreeNode* Node)
{
    if(Node == NULL)
        return 0;

    return 1 + max(FindHeight(Node->LeftChild), FindHeight(Node->RightChild));
}

CountLeaves() implementation

template <class TItem>
int BinarySearchTree<TItem>::CountLeaves()
{
    return CountLeaves(RootNode);
}

template <class TItem>
int BinarySearchTree<TItem>::CountLeaves(BinarySearchTreeNode* Node)
{
    if(Node == NULL)
        return 0;
    else if(Node->LeftChild == NULL && Node->RightChild == NULL)
        return 1;
    else
        return CountLeaves(Node->LeftChild) + CountLeaves(Node->RightChild);
}

I tried to think of how I can implement the two methods without recursion but I'm completely stumped. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

Recursion on a tree with 100,000 nodes should not be a problem if it is balanced. The depth would only be maybe 17, which would not use very much stack in the implementations shown. (log2(100,000) = 16.61). So it seems that maybe the code that is building the tree is not balancing it correctly.