SVN error: ra_serf: The server sent a truncated HTTP response body.

[Colin Foster]

I've started getting this on one of my repos, whenever I try to update or checkout. I've changed the http_timeout setting in my WIndows 10 client's Subversion\servers file to 900, but to no effect. There's no obvious reason for a timeout error - it isn't a result of the client hanging, or of any delay in downloading files.

Also, it always seems to happen on/after the same file, so I'm wondering if there could be any kind of corruption in the repo? However I've done an svnadmin dump of the repo on the server, omitting the latest two revisions in case there was a problem there, and restored into a new repo. The problem persists, exactly as before.

Client is Windows 10, started in 1.10.0 and I've also tried upgrading to 1.10.2, no change. Server is CentOS 7, Apache 2.4

I'm out of ideas, I'd really appreciate any advice anybody can give.

[Luc Van der Veken]

Have you read this?

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27267742/why-do-i-get-svn-e120106-ra-serf-the-server-sent-a-truncated-http-response-b

The timeout increase they propose is to be done at the server.

[Colin Foster]

Luc

Many thanks for that - solved the problem! Sorry for the delay in responding, I promptly got ill and was off work :/

I had been focussed on it being an SVN problem, never gave any thought to Apache just because nothing I saw suggested that when I googled the problem, which was stooopid.

If it helps anyone else who hits this, I set the Apache parameters listed in that post and everythng worked fine again. The Timeout value suggested (12000)  seems a bit wild though, so I've experimented and settled for 600, which seems ample. So does Apache treat the entire transaction as a single request then? I'd just assumed each file transfer would be independent. It seems the KeepAlive-related parameters aren't necessary either, at least in my setup.

Cheers
Colin

[Jan Hlavatý]

Just solved a long standing mystery of timeouts resulting in this error despite the Timeout being set properly in Apache: There was an apache module "reqtimeout" enabled by default I had not configured and it had default settings resulting in disconnects when subversion server took too long to send something (as it often does on large repositories). If you still see the "ra_serf: The server sent a truncated HTTP response body." error even after setting the Timeout try disabling this module :)

[Colin Foster]

Thanks for that, I hadn't met that before either. Doesn't seem to be an issue for me yet, but I've added it to my subversion.conf so I can tweak later if required, seems a good idea if you have large repos.