r - Error: C stack usage is too close to the limit

Question

I'm attempting to run some fairly deep recursive code in R and it keeps giving me this error:

Error: C stack usage is too close to the limit

My output from CStack_info() is:

Cstack_info()
    size    current  direction eval_depth 
67108864       8120          1          2 

I have plenty of memory on my machine, I'm just trying to figure out how I can increase the CStack for R.

EDIT: Someone asked for a reproducible example. Here's some basic sample code that causes the problem. Running f(1,1) a few times you'll get the error. Note that I've already set --max-ppsize = 500000 and options(expressions=500000) so if you don't set those you might get an error about one of those two things instead. As you can see, the recursion can go pretty deep here and I've got no idea how to get it to work consistently. Thanks.

f <- function(root=1,lambda=1) {
    x <- c(0,1);
    prob <- c(1/(lambda+1),lambda/(lambda+1));
        repeat {
      if(root == 0) {
        break;
      }
      else {
        child <- sample(x,2,replace=TRUE,prob);
        if(child[1] == 0 && child[2] == 0) {
          break;
        }
        if(child[1] == 1) {
          child[1] <- f(root=child[1],lambda);
        }
        if(child[2] == 1 && child[1] == 0) {
          child[2] <- f(root=child[2],lambda);
        }
      }
      if(child[1] == 0 && child[2] == 0) {
        break;
      }
      if(child[1] == 1 || child[2] == 1) {
        root <- sample(x,1,replace=TRUE,prob);
      }
        }
    return(root)
}

Answer 1

The stack size is an operating system parameter, adjustable per-process (see setrlimit(2)). You can't adjust it from within R as far as I can tell, but you can adjust it from the shell before starting R, with the ulimit command. It works like this:

$ ulimit -s # print default
8192
$ R --slave -e 'Cstack_info()["size"]'
   size 
8388608

8388608 = 1024 * 8192; R is printing the same value as ulimit -s, but in bytes instead of kilobytes.

$ ulimit -s 16384 # enlarge stack limit to 16 megs
$ R --slave -e 'Cstack_info()["size"]'
    size 
16777216 

To make a permanent adjustment to this setting, add the ulimit command to your shell startup file, so it's executed every time you log in. I can't give more specific directions than that, because it depends on exactly which shell you have and stuff. I also don't know how to do it for logging into a graphical environment (which will be relevant if you're not running R inside a terminal window).