On 28 Jan 2009 at 13:06, Howard Chu wrote:
> [email protected] wrote:
> > Full_Name: Ulrich Windl
> > Version: 2.4.11
> > OS: Linux
> > URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/
> > Submission from: (NULL) (132.199.156.178)
> >
> >
> > Looking for a threaded AVL tree implementation that is supposed to work, I
> > found
> > libraries/liblutil/tavl.c in openLDAP. I'm no expert on threaded AVL trees,
> > but
> > there's thing that worries me:
> > tavl_delete uses two stacks (pptr, pdir) with a size of 8 elements on the
> > routine' stack. While locating the element to delete, it pushes the parent
> > node
> > onto the stack.
>
> You're misreading the code. The stack is 8*sizeof(void *) which means 32
> elements deep on a 32 bit machine, and 64 deep on a 64 bit machine. There is
> no possibility of overflow now or for several years to come.
OK! I was confused by the terrible programming style at that point: as the
array
elements are of the proper type (and not bytes), there is no need for a sizeof
here: I see no reason why the depth of the tree to be allowed should depend on
the
length of a pointer, maning: If you want 32, why don't you write 32? So the
worst
case stack depth would be something like "log2(2^32/(sizeof(void *) * 5))" ("5"
being 2 links + 2 threading marks + 1 data pointer), something near 32-5 == 27
(for 32-bit machines) and 64-6 == 58. Practically the latter could be safely
reduced to a value around 42 IMHO.
>
> > So from my knowledge this means that for a perfectly filled balanced tree,
> > the
> > stack will overflow when the tree consists of 2^8 (2^0 + 2^1 + 2^2 + ... +
> > 2^7)
> > or more nodes, and you are locating a leaf node. Maybe even with fewer
> > nodes.
> > As the algorithm also pushes an other element onto the stack, the problem
> > could
> > appear even before 128 nodes.
>
> --
> -- Howard Chu
> CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com
> Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
> Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
