Problem

After deploying a canary pod with the last alpha, several 503 errors were received by clients. Investigation revealed that the errors correspond to requests with very long paths in URLs.

Root Cause

Old versions of protocol-http1 (a dependency of Falcon) didn't set any limit to URL lengths for incoming requests. A year ago, they added an 8kb limit to protect against DDoS attacks: https://github.com/socketry/protocol-http1/pull/40/files

The last alpha includes a newer version of the gem that includes this limit, causing the errors for clients with URLs longer than 8kb.

Solution

While the 8kb default limit is reasonable for DDoS protection, our clients need a bit more. This change increases the Falcon max line length limit to 12kb.

Related Links

• PR: https://github.com/3scale/apisonator/pull/442
• Upstream change: https://github.com/socketry/protocol-http1/pull/40/files

Impact

• Fixes 503 errors for clients with long URL paths
• Maintains DDoS protection with a reasonable 12kb limit