First of all, I will not post any of the code that is crashing my program, because it's a lot (!) of code, and I can't single out where the crash occurs. What I'm doing is that I'm reading a Maya .obj file, and insert the data into lists/arrays. While doing this, the program crashes. When I was developing the function to read and store the data, I simple stored the data in arrays: float vX[100], vY[100], vZ[100], nX[100], nY[100], nZ[100], uvU[100], uvV[100]; short faceVerts[250][3], faceNormals[250][3], faceUV[250],[3]; With these arrays, the program worked without crashing. However, these arrays are way too small to be acceptable. They need to be quite huge, actually. Maybe 10-50 times as big. So, I tried increasing the size of them, but then my program crashed. I playaed around to see how big I could have them without the program crashing, and found that they can't be made much bigger at all without crashing the program. So, instead of using arrays, I changed to using pointers. short *faceVerts, *faceNormals, *faceUV; faceVerts = new short[500*3]; faceNormals = new short[500*3]; faceUV = new short[500*3]; Still, my program crashed. So, I changed the 500*3 to 5*3 in all the "new short". Program still crashes. Ok, since there's so much code, I'm aware that somewhere there might be a "dumb" use of the pointers, causing it to crash. But I've come across this problem before, while using big bi-dimensional arrays. So, can anyone help me? 1. Why does the program crash when using large arrays? 2. Why doesn't the "new" operator cure the problem? 3. Is there a different way to go about this, if I want to store large amout of data in variables? Thanks a lot! /Desperate for help.

Thanks for the reply.


No, the debugger is not helping. The code is valid, but the program crashes.

I've tried including <iostream.h>, and using a cout << "BLEH!", and putting that in different places, to see how far the program goes before it crashes.

I've gotten strange results with that. Sometimes, it crashes at the "{" in the beginning of the function (which is a class constructor).
But it's not consistant. It crashes at "about" the same place. (?)

We're not psychic. Show the relevant code, please.

Oh, I'm sry... well, I think I might have found the problem. *embarrassed*

I had copy-pasted...

float vX[3], vY[3], vZ[3], // 3 points in 3D space, for vertice placement.
nX[3], nY[3], nZ[3], // 3 points in 3D space, for normals vector.
uvU[3], uvV[3]; // 3 U's and V's for texture placement.

...from a struct I have. Well, that struct is supposed to be declared as an array, and...

Well, to get to the point, I screwed up. array[3] is way too small. My code is attempting to fill it with way more than that, so it's an obvious crash.

However, the problem still exist. When I make my arrays larger, they crash the program.

However, it might be because I run out of system RAM, I'm not sure. It just sounds very unlikely, since I'm not using more RAM than it takes to hold the verts+normals+UV's of a simple 3D cube!


I just want to know if there's a difference between:

float my_array[500];

and...

float* my_array = new float[500];


is there a real difference to this, in the way the memory is handled/reserved? Or is memory being reserved in the exact same way in both cases?

Ah, interesting. That was very useful to me, thank you. :)

Just being curious; Is there a way to increase the maximum size of the stack?

...and I assume you mean 1MB is total max, and not just a max for each array?

Quote:Original post by Justice LeprechauN

Ah, interesting. That was very useful to me, thank you. :)

Just being curious; Is there a way to increase the maximum size of the stack?

...and I assume you mean 1MB is total max, and not just a max for each array?

Yes, total max. And if I were you I wouldn't worry about trying to change the stack size. The sort of allocations you're making should be made on the heap anyway; if the default stack size is insufficent for your program, it may be an indication that there's a problem with the design.

As for the crashes, it could be any number of things, but a good first step would be to switch to std::vector for your array management. Then, make sure you're catching exceptions and performing bounds checking where appropriate, which should go a long way towards catching the bug before your app crashes.

Yeh, I did switch to std::vectors.

Right now, I have a different problem. For some strange reason, my program shuts itself off. No errors, no "sorry it crashed". It just shuts off.
I extracted the function and fixed it, but when I put it back into the project, it still does the same.

Suppose the problem has to be somewhere else then. I think I write code way too fast for my own best.