We are thinking of using a REST interface for communication between internal apps. App A will have to pass a fair bit of data representing a financial portfolio to app B. Is there any limit to the amount of data that can be passed using a REST API given that REST is implemented using HTTP? I wasn't sure if another protocol (ie: RMI) should be used with a large data set.
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No, it's pretty much up to the server implementation if there's any such limit.
There's a limit on the size of a URL (if you wish to put large amounts of data on the URL, like with a GET), but no defined limit for a POST or PUT.
Will Hartung
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13That's true, but I'd like to add that, for large posts and over significant latencies, performance may become an issue, if only because of TCP/IP's limitations. The typical work-around is to upload multiple parts in parallel. – Steven Sudit Sep 30 '09 at 00:29
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As Will Hartung said, there is no limit in the standard (RFC 2616). But every implementation has its own limits. A few examples:
- Two megabytes for Tomcat (you can change it with maxPostSize)
- Two megabytes for PHP (you can change it with
post_max_size) - Two megabytes for Apache itself (you can change it with LimitRequestBody)
These implementation limits are usually just the default configuration values, and can be changed to larger ones if required.
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bortzmeyer
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3I don't think this is correct, at least for Tomcat. maxPostSize only affects payloads with content type application/x-www-form-urlencoded. I suspect the PHP answer has the same limitation, though Apache's LimitRequestBody does seem to do what is being requested. – fool4jesus Jan 11 '13 at 19:07
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1From PHP documentation: `Allow unlimited post size by setting post_max_size to 0.` – Janac Meena Jan 07 '19 at 15:16