Known limitations
Request maximum size
The current maximum request size in Orion Context Broker is 1 MB. This limit should suffice the most of the use cases and, at the same time, avoids denial of service due to too large requests. If you don't take this limitation into account, you will get messages such the following ones:
{
"errorCode" : {
"code" : "413",
"reasonPhrase" : "Request Entity Too Large",
"details" : "payload size: 1500000, max size supported: 1048576"
}
}
Or, if you are sending a huge request, this one:
<html>
<head><title>Internal server error</title></head>
<body>Some programmer needs to study the manual more carefully.</body>
</html>
(Please ignore the "Some programmer needs to study the manual more carefully" text. Developers of the HTTP library in which Orion Context Broker is based seem to be funny guys :) :)
If you find this 1MB limit too coarse, send us an email so we can consider your feedback in future releases.
Notification maximum size
Notification maximum size is set to 8MB. Larger notifications will not be sent by context broker and you will get the following trace in the log file:
HTTP request to send is too large: N bytes
where N is the number of bytes of the too large notification.
Content-Length header is required
Orion Context Broker expects always a Content-Length header in all client requests, otherwise the client will receive a "411 Length Required" response. This is due to the way the underlying HTTP library (microhttpd) works, see details in this email thread in the microhttpd mailing list.
Entity fields length limitation
Due to limitations at MongoDB layer, the length of entity ID, type and servicePath has to follow the following rule.
length(id) + length(type) + length(servicePath) + 10 < 1024
Otherwise, we will get an error at entity creation time.
Entity fields size limitation
Due to underlying DB limitations (see details here), the combined size (sum) of entity id, entity type and entity service path cannot exceed 1014 characters (this is not a typo, it corresponds to 1024 minus 10, details in the aforementioned link ;). If you attempt to overpass the limit you will get a 400 BadRequest "Too long entity id/type/servicePath combination" error.
Subscription cache limitation
Orion Context Broker uses a subscription cache (actually, a bad name, given it is more a mem map than a cache ;) to speed up
subscription triggering. That cache consumes RAM space and if you are using an abnormally high number of subscriptions, Orion
may crash due to memory outage. It would be extremely rare to have that situation in a real usage case (we have been able to
reproduce the situation only in a laboratory setup) but, if happens, then disable cache usage with the -noCache
CLI switch.
As a reference, in our lab tests in a machine with Orion 1.13.0 running with 4 GB RAM, Orion crashed when the number of subscriptions got higher than 211.000 subscriptions.
There is an issue in the repository about improvements related with this.