What is the size limit of a post request?

Question

Sorry if this is duplicate,I would think it would be but couldn\'t find anything.

I have a flex application that I am posting data back to a php/mysql server via IE.

Answer 1

The url portion of a request (GET and POST) can be limited by both the browser and the server - generally the safe size is 2KB as there are almost no browsers or servers that use a smaller limit.

The body of a request (POST) is normally* limited by the server on a byte size basis in order to prevent a type of DoS attack (note that this means character escaping can increase the byte size of the body). The most common server setting is 10MB, though all popular servers allow this to be increased or decreased via a setting file or panel.

*Some exceptions exist with older cell phone or other small device browsers - in those cases it is more a function of heap space reserved for this purpose on the device then anything else.

Answer 2

For developers who cannot change php configuration because of the webhosting. (My settings 256MB max size, 1000 max variables)

I got the same issue that just 2 out of 5 big data objects (associative arrays) with substructures were received on the server side.

I find out that the whole substructure is being "flattened" in the post request. So, one object becomes a hundreds of literal variables. At the end, instead of 5 Object variables it is in reality sending dozens of hundreds elementar variables.

Solution in this case is to serialize each of the substructures into String. Then it is received on the server as 5 String variables. Example: {variable1:JSON.stringify(myDataObject1),variable2:JSON.stringify(myDataObject2)...}

Answer 3

It is up to the http server to decide if there is a limit. The product I work on allows the admin to configure the limit.

Answer 4

You can post large amount of data by setting php.ini variable: max_input_vars Default size of this variable is 1000 but if you want to sent large amount of data you have to increase the size accordingly. If you can't set the size from ini_set you have to do it through htaccess or by doing changes into php.ini file directly.

max_input_vars  2500
memory_limit    256M

Answer 5

One of the best solutions for this, you do not use multiple or more than 1,000 input fields. You can concatenate multiple inputs with any special character, for ex. @.

See this:

<input type='text' name='hs1' id='hs1'>
<input type='text' name='hs2' id='hs2'>
<input type='text' name='hs3' id='hs3'>
<input type='text' name='hs4' id='hs4'>
<input type='text' name='hs5' id='hs5'>

<input type='hidden' name='hd' id='hd'>

Using any script (JavaScript or JScript),

document.getElementById("hd").value = document.getElementById("hs1").value+"@"+document.getElementById("hs2").value+"@"+document.getElementById("hs3").value+"@"+document.getElementById("hs4").value+"@"+document.getElementById("hs5").value

With this, you will bypass the max_input_vars issue. If you increase max_input_vars in the php.ini file, that is harmful to the server because it uses more server cache memory, and this can sometimes crash the server.

Answer 6

It depends on a server configuration. If you're working with PHP under Linux or similar, you can control it using .htaccess configuration file, like so:

#set max post size
php_value post_max_size 20M

And, yes, I can personally attest to the fact that this works :)

If you're using IIS, I don't have any idea how you'd set this particular value.