Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (View The Source) | Hacker News Reader

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded (View The Source)

celtic-lyrics.com

7 pointssymkat14 comments

This is probably to bypass the built in IE error page that is triggered if less than 256 (or 512?) bytes are returned for an error HTTP status.

http://www.404-error-page.com/404-error-page-too-short-probl...

Go figure, 500 errors are rewritten if they're less than 512 bytes. O.O

Good to know, but why would they do this? Is it really worth hiding valuable error information from your users just to what, promote your search engine and have a somewhat more consistent UI?

Google does that with Chrome as well. Now go figure why BigCos do that with their browsers.

PS: at least nginx takes care of this issue http://wiki.nginx.org/HttpCoreModule#msie_padding

Apparently there is insufficient bandwidth to add

  </BODY></HTML>

Edit: Hold on, they did add the closing tags, 400 lines below the <H1> tag. Bizarre.

400 lines? I've got 1001 lines here...

I've got 1000 blank lines. Not entirely blank though, 6 spaces per line (and a \n). That's 7kb for this little trick, when your bandwidth limit has supposedly been exceeded..

I didn't actually count them; I was just guesstimating.

I like how people think that newline characters use more bandwidth than other characters.

That page is about 1K. It could be smaller, but IE wouldn't render it.

It's probably that it makes it slightly easier to see in an editor. But that still raises the question of why use white space instead of a comment to start?

Not newlines... View it in a real editor. :-)

This is to thwart stupid browsers that hide HTTP errors less than a certain number of bytes, which is incredibly annoying.

My first thought was that they could golf this down to just:

  <!DOCTYPE html><TITLE>509 Bandwidth Limit Exceeded</TITLE><H1>Bandwidth Limit Exceeded</H1> The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.

I wonder if the bandwidth exceeded messages count against your bandwidth quota.

"No freaking way."

"Does the server note when the same user makes a second request (in firefox, at least, 'view source' makes another http request, even if you have already loaded the page) and then only provide half the page?"

"Wait. Why is my scroll-bar so long..."

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