This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.

Bug 6678 - Reporting error '500 Line too long (4127; limit is 4096)' but don't know why
Summary: Reporting error '500 Line too long (4127; limit is 4096)' but don't know why
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: Validator
Classification: Unclassified
Component: check (show other bugs)
Version: HEAD
Hardware: PC Windows XP
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: 0.8.6
Assignee: Ville Skyttä
QA Contact: qa-dev tracking
URL: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=htt...
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2009-03-10 16:23 UTC by Colin
Modified: 2009-10-05 15:18 UTC (History)
0 users

See Also:


Attachments

Description Colin 2009-03-10 16:23:19 UTC
I've been trying to validate my site but keep getting the error '500 Line too long (4127; limit is 4096)'.  I have tried everything I can but can't figure out what the problem is.  I have other sites built with the same template which all validate fine, but this and one other throw this error.

Is it possible to elaborate on the error in some way.

Thanks.
Comment 1 Ville Skyttä 2009-09-17 19:16:23 UTC
The reproducer URL seems to require authentication now so this can't be verified with at the moment, but another reproducer is
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FBugs%2FPublic%2Fbuglist.cgi%3Fproduct%3DValidator%3Border%3Dbugs.bug_id

The error comes from the libwww-perl library which sets maximum line length for HTTP headers and some other things to 4096 bytes (or characters, I haven't checked that closely).  This may not be enough in certain cases, such as the reproducer above, which tries to set a very long cookie.  Perhaps that's the issue with your URL as well.

I don't know if/how the validator could do anything about this right now, but I'll look into whether bumping the default max line length somewhat in upstream libwww-perl would be an option.
Comment 2 Colin 2009-09-18 08:22:15 UTC
Thanks for the response.  I figured this out a while back actually but forgot to update this post.  The problem was due to storing page permissions in the cookie to save on data access, and when the site reached a certain number of pages the cookie got too large.  It also affected Google Analytics and a few other third party services so was causing quite a problem for us.

Anyway it's resolved now but thanks for your time.

Colin.
Comment 3 Ville Skyttä 2009-10-05 15:18:14 UTC
The default max line length has been increased to 8k in upstream libwww-perl (will probably appear in 5.833) and the next versions of the validator and link checker will have a workaround for this issue also when running with earlier libwww-perl versions.

http://www.w3.org/mid/E1MupGC-0006rC-8X%40lionel-hutz.w3.org