Decodes Buffers into HttpResponses and HttpContents.

Parameters that prevents excessive memory consumption

Name	Meaning
maxInitialLineLength	The maximum length of the initial line (e.g. "HTTP/1.0 200 OK") If the length of the initial line exceeds this value, a TooLongHttpLineException will be raised.
maxHeaderSize	The maximum length of all headers. If the sum of the length of each header exceeds this value, a TooLongHttpHeaderException will be raised.
maxChunkSize	The maximum length of the content or each chunk. If the content length exceeds this value, the transfer encoding of the decoded response will be converted to 'chunked' and the content will be split into multiple HttpContents. If the transfer encoding of the HTTP response is 'chunked' already, each chunk will be split into smaller chunks if the length of the chunk exceeds this value. If you prefer not to handle HttpContents in your handler, insert HttpObjectAggregator after this decoder in the ChannelPipeline.

Decoding a response for a HEAD request

Unlike other HTTP requests, the successful response of a HEAD request does not have any content even if there is Content-Length header. Because HttpResponseDecoder is not able to determine if the response currently being decoded is associated with a HEAD request, you must override isContentAlwaysEmpty(HttpMessage) to return true for the response of the HEAD request.

If you are writing an HTTP client that issues a HEAD request, please use HttpClientCodec instead of this decoder. It will perform additional state management to handle the responses for HEAD requests correctly.

Decoding a response for a CONNECT request

You also need to do additional state management to handle the response of a CONNECT request properly, like you did for HEAD. One difference is that the decoder should stop decoding completely after decoding the successful 200 response since the connection is not an HTTP connection anymore.

HttpClientCodec also handles this edge case correctly, so you have to use HttpClientCodec if you are writing an HTTP client that issues a CONNECT request.