We all have encountered a publish failure caused by the Tridion http deployer website throwing errors like ‘request entity too large’. Basically, it means that IIS does not accept the uploaded publish package because it’s simply too large.

Luckily, the solution is quite simple, but we recently discovered a small gotcha.

To fix this issue, you need to make two changes. They are described in several posts in SE, and possibly in other blogs

– First, you need to open the web.config file of your http deployer website, and set the following values

<system.web>
    <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="204800" executionTimeout="300" maxQueryStringLength="2097151" />
 </system.web>
 <system.webServer>
    <security>
      <requestFiltering>
          <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="209715200" maxQueryString="9999" maxUrl="10999"/>
       </requestFiltering>
 </security>

The values in bold define that IIS will now accept files as large as 200 MB.

Secondly, you also need to change your cd_deployer_conf.xml. In this file, you ned to change the max size setting of the https receiver.

<HTTPSReceiver MaxSize="209715200" Location="C:\tridion\incoming" InProcessDeploy="true"/>

When you changed these values, make sure to recycle the application pool of your httpupload website.

There’s one gotcha with this : if you become overzealous, and you set the file size to some extreme big value, publishing may start failing again. If you set the maxAllowedContentLength to a value higher than the maximum value of an unsigned int (4294967295), IIS will not recognize it, and fall back to it’s defaults, which is about 30 MB.

So, in that case, publishing will work, but once you publish a file larger than 30 MB, publishing will fail again, complaining the “request entity is too large”.