What is the maximum size of document to return from a REST API?
apache, django, rest, web-services
Solution
This is really a constraint of HTTP and nothing to do with REST. Personally, I regularly download content that is hundreds of megabytes over HTTP and don't have any problems.
Problem
I am considering creating a RESTful web service which will return a lot of data. What do people think is the maximum size of xml document that should be returned in one get from a web services API? I would estimate the size of the result set to be 100Mb and time to produce this would be about 2h. How much time is a reasonable maximum for the server to be calculating a result set before returning the document? The web server is Apache using django on mod_python. The web service would only be called once or twice a day. Are there any special configuration options I should enable to make this work on the Apache/mod_python/django stack.