Meaning and solution for Spring 3 error message? "Using getResponseBodyAsStream instead is recommended"

Question

I'm using Spring 3 and every time I submit a HTML form to a Spring controller I get this message, which I don't understand:

org.apache.commons.httpclient.HttpMethodBase getResponseBody
WARNING: Going to buffer response body of large or unknown size. 
Using getResponseBodyAsStream instead is recommended.

Is there a configuration change I can make in Spring to avoid this?

Answer 1

This occurs with the commons-httpclient API when the getResponseBody() method is used. The warning means that a response body could potentially be very large (such as a large file download, etc.) and loading the whole thing into memory at once as a String could be very inefficient. The way to avoid this potential inefficiency is to use getResponseBodyAsStream(), which will allow proper buffering and streaming of the response body.

I am not sure why Spring is using getResponseBody(). Could it be your HTTP client? Are you using a custom-written HTTP client to perform the request?