Can HTTP POST be limitless

Question

I heard that HTTP POST has no specification limit in data size it can be sent by  Is that true or is there just some really high limit

User · Answer

Quite amazing how all answers talk about IIS, as if that were the only web server that mattered. Even back in 2010 when the question was asked, Apache had between 60% and 70% of the market share. Anyway,

The HTTP protocol does not specify a limit.
The POST method allows sending far more data than the GET method, which is limited by the URL length - about 2KB.
The maximum POST request body size is configured on the HTTP server and typically ranges from
1MB to 2GB
The HTTP client (browser or other user agent) can have its own limitations. Therefore, the maximum POST body request size is min(serverMaximumSize, clientMaximumSize).

Here are the POST body sizes for some of the more popular HTTP servers:

Ngix (largest web server market share as of April 2019) - default 1MB, no practical maximum (2**63)
Apache - maximum 2GB, no default documented
IIS - default 28.6MB for the request length, 2048 bytes for the query string; maximum undocumented
InfluxDB - default ~25MB, maximum undocumented

User · Answer

EDIT  2019  This answer is now pretty redundant but there is another answer with more relevant information   It rather depends on the web server and web browser   Internet explorer  All versions  2GB-1 Mozilla Firefox  All versions  2GB-1 IIS  1-5  2GB-1 IIS  6  4GB-1    Although IIS only support 200KB by default  the metabase needs amending to increase this   http   www motobit com help scptutl pa98 htm  The POST method itself does not have any limit on the size of data

User · Answer

There is no limit according to the HTTP protocol itself  but implementations will have a practical upper limit  I have sent data exceeding 4 GB using POST to Apache  but some servers did have a limit of 4 GB at the time

User · Answer

Different IIS web servers can process different amounts of data in the  header   according to this  now deleted  article  http   classicasp aspfaq com forms what-is-the-limit-on-form post-parameters html      Note that there is no limit on the   number of FORM elements you can pass   via POST  but only on the aggregate   size of all name value pairs     While   GET is limited to as low as 1024   characters  POST data is limited to 2   MB on IIS 4 0  and 128 KB on IIS 5 0    Each name value is limited to 1024   characters  as imposed by the SGML   spec  Of course this does not apply to   files uploaded using   enctype  multipart form-data      I   have had no problems uploading files   in the 90 - 100 MB range using IIS   5 0  aside from having to increase the server scriptTimeout value as well as   my patience

User · Answer

POST allows for an arbitrary length of data to be sent to a server  but there are limitations based on timeouts bandwidth etc   I think basically  it s safer to assume that it s not okay to send lots of data

User · Answer

In an application I was developing I ran into what appeared to be a POST limit of about 2KB  It turned out to be that I was accidentally encoding the parameters into the URL instead of passing them in the body  So if you re running into a problem there  there is definitely a very small limit on the size of POST data you can send encoded into the URL

User · Answer

HTTP may not have an upper limit  but webservers may have one  In ASP NET there is a default accept-limit of 4 nbsp MB  but you  the developer webmaster  can change that to be higher or lower

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