Are there any limitations on the size of the cookie? Also, is this browser dependent?
Answers:
Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Method 1
The “official” maximum size is 4KB, but I would prefer to keep it well under that: no more than a few hundred bytes, tops.
The reason is that cookies are transmitted from the client to the server with every single request – even when requesting images, css and js files (if they reside on the same host something you should avoid in general, but for small sites may not be worth the bother). That means that you’ll be requiring the client to transmit 4KB for every request – remembering also that most consumer broadband has much slower upload speed than download speed.
Method 2
Importantly the official cookie spec RFC 2965 states the minimums browser should adhere to:
5.3 Implementation Limits Practical user agent implementations have limits
on the number and size of cookies that
they can store. In general, user
agents’ cookie support should have no
fixed limits. They should strive to
store as many frequently-used cookies
as possible. Furthermore, general-use
user agents SHOULD provide each of the
following minimum capabilities
individually, although not necessarily
simultaneously:
- at least 300 cookies
- at least 4096 bytes per cookie (as measured by the characters that
comprise the cookie non-terminal in
the syntax description of the
Set-Cookie2 header, and as received in
the Set-Cookie2 header)- at least 20
cookies per unique host or domain nameUser agents created for specific
purposes or for limited-capacity
devices SHOULD provide at least 20
cookies of 4096 bytes, to ensure that
the user can interact with a
session-based origin server.The
information in a Set-Cookie2 response
header MUST be retained in its
entirety. If for some reason there is
inadequate space to store the cookie,
it MUST be discarded, not truncated.
Applications should use as few and as
small cookies as possible, and they
should cope gracefully with the loss
of a cookie.Read more:
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2965.html#ixzz0rjy5CJQa
Microsoft saves cookies into the
“Temporary Internet Files” folder, a
system folder that you can set the
maximum size of (the default is 2% of
your hard drive).In any event, remember that most
cookie files are 4KB or smaller, so
you would need about a million cookies
to fill up a 4GB drive. This is
incredibly unlikely.
You’ll see the 4kb limit reference around the internet along with other useful stats.
Method 3
4kb = 4096 bytes
If I recall correctly, independent of browser. See Can cookies get too big.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0