What is a chunked request in OpenTSDB?

Question

I'm using Qt4 to post some data points to a OpenTSDB server, which doesn't supports chunked HTTP requests.

The code is basically this:

QNetworkRequest request(m_url);
request.setHeader(QNetworkRequest::ContentTypeHeader, QString("application/json"));
request.setHeader(QNetworkRequest::ContentLengthHeader, jsonRequest.toAscii().size());
m_networkAccessManager.post(request, jsonRequest.toAscii());

jsonRequest is a QString containing the data points. This code is called from time to time to upload data to the server, and it usually works fine. However, sometimes I receive an error from openTSDB stating that "Chunked request not supported.". This seems to happen when the request gets a little bigger (and by bigger, I mean some KB of data).

edit: I've done a tcpdump of the request when the problem arises, and in fact it doesn't seen to be chunked:

POST /api/put HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 14073
Connection: Keep-Alive
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Accept-Language: en,*
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0
Host: 192.168.xx.xxx:xxxx

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400 Bad Request
Content-Length: 1080
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Thu, 08 Jan 2015 17:18:43 GMT

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"><html><head><meta http-equiv=content-type content="text/html;charset=utf-8"><title>Bad Request</title>
<style><!--
body{font-family:arial,sans-serif;margin-left:2em}A.l:link{color:#6f6f6f}A.u:link{color:green}.subg{background-color:#e2f4f7}.fwf{font-family:monospace;white-space:pre-wrap}//--></style></head>
<body text=#000000 bgcolor=#ffffff><table border=0 cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0 width=100%><tr><td rowspan=3 width=1% nowrap><b><font color=#c71a32 size=10>T</font><font color=#00a189 size=10>S</font><font color=#1a65b7 size=10>D</font>&nbsp;&nbsp;</b><td>&nbsp;</td></tr><tr><td class=subg><font color=#507e9b><b>Looks like it's your fault this time</b></td></tr><tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr></table><blockquote><h1>Bad Request</h1>Sorry but your request was rejected as being invalid.<br/><br/>The reason provided was:<blockquote>Chunked request not supported.</blockquote></blockquote><table width=100% cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0><tr><td class=subg><img alt="" width=1 height=6></td></tr></table></body></html>

I was thinking Qt was changing to use a chunked request when the request got larger, but it's not the case. So the current question is: what is a chunked request in openTSDB?

Answer 1

I've finally found the reason it thinks my request is chunked: OpenTSDB internally uses Netty for networking, and if Netty reads a block that doesn't contain the complete request, then it's flagged as chunked, even if there's no Transfer-Encoding header in the request.

There are two possible solutions for this:

• adding "tsd.http.request.enable_chunked = true" to the config file, so that it doesn't reject chunked requests and adding "tsd.http.request.max_chunk = " to the config file, and setting it to a sensible size for your requests
• If you can change the client, force it to send smaller requests

Please note that enabling chunked requests for public facing servers may not be a good idea, as a malicious client can send unbounded requests, overloading the server.

Credits goes to irc users jaylr and manolama, who provided me the info on irc channel #[email protected]