RE: Maximum send and recv length in Gopher

For the “how big should a response be?  There is no answer for that---a file is as big as it is.” question: my own Gopher client program by default will only attempt to download 500000 bytes of file data. A user can set the value to something different.

You might wonder why I put in a  limit – and to be honest, I’ve forgotten if there was a good reason or not. In any case, I take the resulting stream and stuff it into a in-memory array, so having some kind of limit makes sense.

Peter 

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

From: Натаниэль Левеск
Sent: Monday, June 15, 2020 11:24 AM
To: [email protected]; Sean Conner
Subject: Re: Maximum send and recv length in Gopher



On June 15, 2020 9:14:50 AM UTC, Sean Conner <sean-/[email protected]> wrote:
>It was thus said that the Great Emil Engler once stated:
>> I'm curious, isn't this the lenght you can enter in a telnet client
>for
>> example?
>> What is if you write your own TCP client which sends a request longer
>than
>> this.
>> Although this wasn't my question. I'm currently working on a gopherd
>and I
>> am not sure if I should support data transfer bigger than a certain
>size.
>
>  To start with, ARG_MAX is the maximum size of the argument list to a
>process, it has nothing to do with network programming.
>

It may not have anything to do with the network side of things, but it has everything to do with your server executable. My gopherd, Xylophar, doesn't know it is a piece of network software, for example. Xinetd calls it and it accepts the request via user input and this is limited by the programming language. Other gopherd's accept the request as command line arguments and this is limited by the shell it is running under. There are infinite ways to skin this cat. Otherwise we agree.