Welcome to Nerdville

My colleague at work is faced with handling URLs of a particularly great length. In our system, we don’t usually encounter URLs longer than 250 characters, and even our custom URL shortening system only accommodates URLs 1,000 or fewer characters in length. The question then arose of how long is too long when it comes to URLs? Should we be expected to store URLs as long as a SQL text field (2,147,483,647 characters)?

So I hopped around on the Internets (all three of them!) for a while, and found this neat reference on Boutell.com. This individual tested entering URLs of different lengths into the major browsers and also requesting them from both major web servers to see what would happen. Here’s the best part, for your enjoyment and edification.

The default limit [ in Microsoft IIS -ed ] is 16,384 characters (yes, Microsoft’s web server accepts longer URLs than Microsoft’s web browser). This is configurable.

I guess Microsoft’s inter-departmental communications aren’t quite as robust as one would hope. Who has a 16,384 character URL, anyway?