"Too Busy" Error Needed

Bob Denny (rdenny@netcom.com)
Wed, 8 Jun 94 12:42:41 PDT

There are situations when an HTTP server may want to indicate that it is too
busy to accept a request. There is no code for this defined in the HTTP2 spec.
Taking the "spirit" of the 400 vs 500 errors, since this is a server
"problem", it seems like the 500 series is appropriate.

The Windows httpd (v1.2b8 and later) reports when it is too busy to accept
another request by returning a "503 Too Busy", followed by a short HTML
message. What it means is that there are already 8 active transactions, the
server's limit. The error is returned in the server dispatcher thread without
starting any new transaction threads.

If nobody argues, I'll leave it that way. It ought to get added to the spec.

-- Bob