The most-common cause of stack overflow is excessively deep or infinite recursion, in which a function calls itself so many times that the space needed to store the variables and information associated with each call is more than can fit on the stack.

How does recursion prevent stack overflow?

Tail recursion is a recursion of a function where it does not consumes stack space and hence prevents stack overflow. If the recursive function is made tail-recursive then it is more efficient than a non-tail-recursive function because every function call does not need to go on stack and pop when the call is done.

What causes a stack overflow error?

A StackOverflowError is a runtime error in Java. It is thrown when the amount of call stack memory allocated by the JVM is exceeded. A common case of a StackOverflowError being thrown, is when the call stack exceeds due to excessive deep or infinite recursion.