The following comes from feedback via the web:

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comments: There seems to be a dearth of information (and a surplus of misinformation) regarding stack sizes on Windows. The best information I've found (after a lot of searching) is in a bug report: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4689767. Many of the forums contain bad information, such as http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=37&threadID=418834, which claims that -Xss doesn't do anything on Windows.
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> The HotSpot performance documentation (http://java.sun.com/docs/hotspot/PerformanceFAQ.html) says that on Windows, the default stack size is "whatever the default stack size is when creating a thread in the OS." At best that's true but unhelpful. At worst, it's mis-leading (the default stack size on Windows is generally 1Mb; however, bug id 4689767 points out that java.exe is linked to use a 256k stack).
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> For additional observations on the Windows stack size behavior, please see my post in the forums at http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=610340.
###@###.### 2005-04-06 02:28:15 GMT