In addition to the helpful responses posted here, I appreciate Limbic~Region's reminder in the ChatterBox that we can't rely on the HTML form to impose length and content restrictions. It is easy to download a local copy of the page and modify it (or even to manually construct a posting URL).

In particular, Limbic~Region mentions the possibility of potential modification of the $CGI::DISABLE_UPLOADS and $CGI::POST_MAX values.

For me, this possibility places a greater burden on the receiving script. A)Nothing dangerous (like a malevolent cgi script) should be uploaded to a place where it could be invoked from the web and B)Massive return values from the form fields should probably be simply discarded rather than attempting to process/forward/store them.

In the current case, as best I can tell, uploads are not an issue. I assume someone could construct and post a response containing a dangerous or large upload. But without intervention by the receiving script, I presume it would simply languish in a tmp directory. A large, ininvited upload might slow the server down a bit or threaten the harddisk capacity, but there are other places (e.g. httpd.conf) to deal with that.

On the other hand, over-large form data needs to be anticipated and handled appropriately within the receiving script.