Question

I am developing a web application with Spring 3 and jquery and i am using an ajax upload script to send files to the server (Tomcat 7.0.22). A file is posted to the server with a content-type of application/octet-stream
and the server parses it fine as a byte array. However although i have even explicitly set in the tomcat configuration the value of maxpostsize to 2097152, this setting appears to have no effect at all. For example i am able to upload files (locally) large enough (> 1 GB) to crash the server (out of memory). Here are the request headers from firebug:

Host    localhost:8080
User-Agent  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:7.0.1) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/7.0.1
Accept  text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip, deflate
Accept-Charset  ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Connection  keep-alive
X-Requested-With    XMLHttpRequest
X-File-Name some-pdf.pdf
Content-Type    application/octet-stream
Referer http://localhost:8080/myapp/
Content-Length  9369597
Cookie  JSESSIONID=F237BA8176D158A297BAFA7F57A98A5F;
Pragma  no-cache
Cache-Control   no-cache

Here is the Tomcat’s connector config

 <Service name="Catalina">

<Connector port="8080" protocol="HTTP/1.1" 
           connectionTimeout="20000" 
           redirectPort="8443" 
           maxPostSize="2097152"/>

Answer 1

Although this is an old question:

As can be seen in Request.java, maxPostSize is taken into account only for the “application/x-www-form-urlencoded” content type and is not affected by how the request is made (“normal” vs. xhr).