What's the size limit for a field in a form post?

Question

The title is self-explanatory, if you're using a form field to post text of arbitrary size, what limits are considered relevant? Memory limits, browser limits, application server limits?

Update:

A form method=post is the case. The form field is being used to submit a file (its contents) to the server. The file is generated on the client using a Java Applet. An alternative would be to store the file on disk and upload it using a file input in the form. However this will leave files on disk. Database isn't an issue here, the file will be stored as a blob.

Answer 1

depends what you do with the data, if the text goes in a column in a database that can only handle 8000 characters then it of course doesn't make sense to allow for more than that

So first you need to decide where the data will go into

Answer 2

When using enctype="multipart/form-data", the size is not limited by the protocol but by what your server can handle (RAM, hard disk space, database).