Question on AspBufferingLimit / AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed

[John]

Hi,

I'm running a Windows 2003 Std Edition server and I have a question on
these limits in the IIS Metabase. It appears that out of the box, they
default to 6194304, which allows an ASP app to upload/download 6mb of
data. How much can these be increased and what is the downside of
increasing them? I searched Technet and found 'generic' definitions of
what they are for, but no real info on why these particular limits were
chosen, etc.

Thanks.

John

 

[Anthony Jones]

Hi,

I'm running a Windows 2003 Std Edition server and I have a question on
these limits in the IIS Metabase. It appears that out of the box, they
default to 6194304, which allows an ASP app to upload/download 6mb of
data. How much can these be increased and what is the downside of
increasing them? I searched Technet and found 'generic' definitions of
what they are for, but no real info on why these particular limits were
chosen, etc.

I'm not sure where you got your info on the defaults but the actual defaults
on a vanilla system are, AspBufferingLimit: 4MB and
AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed: 200K.

Increasing the buffering limit will allow a request to consume more memory,
its main purposes is to allow hosting services to limit the buffer used by
the various applications they are hosting. On a privately owned server
where the request pressure is not so great this limit can be raised fairly
safely, that said you probably don't want to raise to much, most large
downloads can be performed with chunked transfers.

The allowed entity size is also a protection for hosting service in terms of
memory that can be allocated. However it also helps agains DOS attacks
where someone might otherwise attempt to upload a stupidly large entity.
Again in the private case you could consider increasing this to the level
you need.

 

[John]

I'm not sure where you got your info on the defaults but the actual
defaults on a vanilla system are, AspBufferingLimit: 4MB and
AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed: 200K.

Increasing the buffering limit will allow a request to consume more
memory, its main purposes is to allow hosting services to limit the
buffer used by the various applications they are hosting. On a
privately owned server where the request pressure is not so great this
limit can be raised fairly safely, that said you probably don't want to
raise to much, most large downloads can be performed with chunked
transfers.

The allowed entity size is also a protection for hosting service in
terms of memory that can be allocated. However it also helps agains DOS
attacks where someone might otherwise attempt to upload a stupidly large
entity. Again in the private case you could consider increasing this to
the level you need.

Thanks. I had read that those were the defaults. However, I didn't
change them, yet they are both set to 6mb -

AspBufferingLimit="6194304"
AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed="6194304"

My assumption is that either the application that runs on the server
changed them as part of it's installation or our consultant who
installed the application made the change, although she has indicated
that she had not.

This is a 'private' server, although it does have a 'portal' feature to
allow our customers access, should we choose to do so.

Thanks.

John

 

[John]

I'm not sure where you got your info on the defaults but the actual
defaults on a vanilla system are, AspBufferingLimit: 4MB and
AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed: 200K.

Increasing the buffering limit will allow a request to consume more
memory, its main purposes is to allow hosting services to limit the
buffer used by the various applications they are hosting. On a
privately owned server where the request pressure is not so great this
limit can be raised fairly safely, that said you probably don't want to
raise to much, most large downloads can be performed with chunked
transfers.

The allowed entity size is also a protection for hosting service in
terms of memory that can be allocated. However it also helps agains DOS
attacks where someone might otherwise attempt to upload a stupidly large
entity. Again in the private case you could consider increasing this to
the level you need.

Thanks. I had read that those were the defaults. However, I didn't
change them, yet they are both set to 6mb -

AspBufferingLimit="6194304"
AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed="6194304"

My assumption is that either the application that runs on the server
changed them as part of it's installation or our consultant who
installed the application made the change, although she has indicated
that she had not.

This is a 'private' server, although it does have a 'portal' feature to
allow our customers access, should we choose to do so.

Thanks.

John