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.
+2
A:
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
2009-09-30 00:10:09
That'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
2009-09-30 00:29:48
+3
A:
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)
bortzmeyer
2009-09-30 17:26:39