# Maximum read size with Net::HTTP.get?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/maximum-read-size-with-net-http-get/48329>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [November 18, 2005, 10:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/maximum-read-size-with-net-http-get/48329 "2005-11-18T22:54:42Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![smorabito](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/ecc23a/32.png) [@smorabito](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/smorabito)\
**Post date:** [November 18, 2005, 10:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/maximum-read-size-with-net-http-get/48329/1 "2005-11-18T22:54:42Z")

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Folks,

I have a Ruby application that allows users fairly arbitrary access to  
URLs. The application then opens and reads the object at that URL  
using Net::HTTP.get() and attempts to parse it as an XML document.

So far so good.

But this is a Rails app open to the general public, and it would be  
fairly trivial to write a CGI somewhere that just returns garbage data  
forever, leaving open a pretty obvious DoS attack.

I’d like to specify a maximum number of bytes to read with  
Net::HTTP.get(), so, for example, if the process had read more than 1MB  
it would throw an exception and stop reading. I haven’t been able to  
find a way to do that so far, but then I confess to being fairly new to  
Ruby.

Does anyone have any ideas or pointers?

-Seth