I've got some Javascript code which uses fairly deep recursion and I'd like to find out what the recursion limits in the various browsers are (i.e. the point at which the error "too much recursion" will happen).

Anyone have any solid numbers on this, by version?

I've got some Javascript code which uses fairly deep recursion and I'd like to find out what the recursion limits in the various browsers are (i.e. the point at which the error "too much recursion" will happen).

Anyone have any solid numbers on this, by version?

• javascript
• recursion

2 Answers 2

Nicholas C. Zakas writes in his blog:

• Internet Explorer 7: 1,789
• Firefox 3: 3,000
• Chrome 1: 21,837
• Opera 9.62: 10,000
• Safari 3.2: 500

There's some more data on different browsers and OSs here.

I've created a Browserscope test to get more data. Please run it here.

Update Feb 2019:

The results above are now obsolete, but the browserscope results are updated :

• IE 11: 12,064
• Firefox 65: 20,614
• Chrome 72: 9,643
• Opera 57: 9,638
• Safari 12: 32,035

To add to the answers here, this can depend on the functions involved in the recursion, as well. For example, just adding a few parameters to the function can change the result:

var i=0;
function inc() {
    i++;
    inc();
}
inc();

gives me 20923, but

var i=0;
function inc(j, k, l) {
    i++;
    inc(l, k, j);
}
inc(1, 2, 3);

reports 13949 (tested in the console in Chromium 39). Firefox 34 gives 25085 and 13572, respectively.

Adding a try/catch block around the body of the zero-argument inc() gives 11413 frames in Chromium and 13161 in Firefox. With both 3 arguments and the try/catch block, 8967 in Chrome and 7517 in Firefox.

My takeaway from this is that an application that works near the stack depth in a browser can probably only figure this out based on empirical measurements of functions resembling those used in the app.