URI Too Long

Overview

414 URI Too Long means the request URI is longer than the server is willing to interpret. It is usually caused by stuffing too much data into a GET query string.

The spec sets no hard URL length limit, but servers, proxies, and browsers each impose one in practice (often around 8 KB). Passing hundreds of IDs or an encoded state blob as query parameters easily exceeds it.

When it happens

• A GET request's query string is excessively long
• Data that belongs in a body is passed as URL parameters
• Filter/sort/selection state is serialized wholesale into the URL, making links balloon

Request / Response example

GET /search?q=aaaaaaaa...<8000+ chars>...zzzz HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

HTTP/1.1 414 URI Too Long
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 40

<h1>414 Request-URI Too Long</h1>

In code

# Raise the buffers that hold the request line + URI
server {
  large_client_header_buffers 4 16k;
}

// Instead of a giant query string, POST the filter as JSON
await fetch('/search', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: { 'Content-Type': 'application/json' },
  body: JSON.stringify({ ids: hugeArray })
});

Notes

• A common practical rule is to keep URLs under roughly 2,000 characters for broad compatibility with older browsers and proxies.
• In Nginx this limit is governed by large_client_header_buffers; in Apache by LimitRequestLine.

Related status codes

Related headers

Specification