503 (Service Unavailable) from Varnish on POST request using Digest Authentication

Sergio Rus sergio at sergiorus.com
Mon May 14 09:50:11 UTC 2018


Well, this issue is not really about the authentication process itself. As
I said, the endpoint was using Digest Authentication, but I was
intentionally not including the auth header, so I was expecting to get in
the client a 401 UNAUTHORIZED response, but instead I was getting a 503
coming from Varnish. Everything works fine without Varnish: the client gets
the 401 UNAUTHORIZED in every case, using any payload size. So I just
wanted to understand why Varnish was failing with a 503, and after several
tests I found that reducing the payload size a little bit, keeping it
around 7K-8K, it worked. A few bytes bigger, close to 8K, it failed (503).
To me, it looks like Varnish has some sort of size limit for the objects
that can keep in memory that is not only applied for the headers size, but
also for the payload in POST requests. Unfortunately I couldn't find in the
documentation any parameter related to this. But as I said, increasing a
parameter wouldn't be the right solution, because at some point it would
fail again with bigger payloads.

Cheers
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