3.3.1 Tuning the HTTP parser

As a number of HTTP servers and CGI scripts serve incorrect HTTP headers, Polipo uses a lax parser, meaning that incorrect HTTP headers will be ignored (a warning will be logged by default). If the variable laxHttpParser is not set (it is set by default), Polipo will use a strict parser, and refuse to serve an instance unless it could parse all the headers.

When the amount of headers exceeds one chunk’s worth (see Chunk memory), Polipo will allocate a big buffer in order to store the headers. The size of big buffers, and therefore the maximum amount of headers Polipo can parse, is specified by the variable bigBufferSize (32kB by default).