RE: HTTP/2 Upgrade with content?

A server is blocked on the connection, just as it would be in HTTP/1.1.  The situation for the server is no worse than if the client weren’t offering Upgrade.  Servers will enforce the same limits of large bodies they’re not willing to handle.  Issuing a 413, telling the client that the reason their request isn’t being serviced is due to the size of the body, is confusing if the actual way to make it be serviced is to omit the Upgrade header.  That’s a bizarre use of 413.

My inclination would be for servers to ignore the Upgrade header if they don’t want to be blocked.  Clients will always need to handle Upgrade headers being ignored, since they can legitimately be stripped by intermediaries.  Clients will never understand all the reasons why some Upgrades work and some don’t – they have to handle both cases cleanly.

From: Greg Wilkins [mailto:gregw@intalio.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 12, 2015 4:10 PM
To: HTTP Working Group
Subject: HTTP/2 Upgrade with content?


Section 3.2 describes the upgrade to HTTP/2 and it allows support for upgrade requests with bodies:

   Requests that contain an entity body MUST be sent in their entirety

   before the client can send HTTP/2 frames. This means that a large

   request entity can block the use of the connection until it is

   completely sent.
Servers will need to protect themselves from DoS attacks via such requests as buffering arbitrary large content in their entirety is a commitment that servers cannot generally give.
Thus servers will have to limit the size of the entities they are prepared to hold in this situation (and the size of a single normal request buffers is probably the memory commitment they are prepared to make for any given connection).

My question is, what should a server do if it receives an otherwise valid upgrade request that it could handle but with content that exceeds this memory limit?      Should it respond with a 413 REQUEST_ENTITY_TOO_LARGE or should it just ignore the upgrade and let the request be handled via HTTP/1.1 (which can stream the content into the request handler and it becomes somebody else's problem to limit memory usage).
My problem with ignoring the upgrade is that it is an arbitrary limit and it will be hard for clients to tell why some upgrades work and others do not.
Alternately my problem with 413 is that some servers might wish to avoid the whole upgrade with content path and thus send a 413 for any upgrade with content, which may break some clients that could otherwise proceed with HTTP/1.1
thoughts?

PS. in hindsight, I would rather that we had not allowed upgrades with content and instead told clients to upgrade with an OPTION request prior to any PUT/POST request.... gallop... gallop... gallop.... SLAM!



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