I am building a suffix trie (unfortunately, no time to properly implement a suffix tree) for a 10 character set. The strings I wish to parse are going to be rather long (up to 1M characters). The tree is constructed without any problems, however, I run into some when I try to free the memory after being done with it.

In particularly, if I set up my constructor and destructor to be as such (where CNode.child is a pointer to an array of 10 pointers to other CNodes, and count is a simple unsigned int):

CNode::CNode(){
    count = 0;
    child = new CNode* [10];
    memset(child, 0, sizeof(CNode*) * 10);
}

CNode::~CNode(){
    for (int i=0; i<10; i++)
        delete child[i];
}

I get a stack overflow when trying to delete the root node. I might be wrong, but I am fairly certain that this is due to too many destructor calls (each destructor calls up to 10 other destructors). I know this is suboptimal both space, and time-wise, however, this is supposed to be a quick-and-dirty solution to a the repeated substring problem.

tl;dr: how would one go about freeing the memory occupied by a very deep tree?

Thank you for your time.