title: HTTP GET request with many items in query string
body: <p>We make an HTTP GET request with a lot of data in the query string, representing all of the ids of a collection to retrieve.</p>
  
  <p>Regarding the limit on the length of the query string in the url, a quick google search says:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>RFC 3986 also states there is no limit, but indicates the hostname is
    limited to 255 characters because of DNS limitations (section 2.3.3).
    Microsoft states that the maximum length of a URL in Internet Explorer
    is 2,083 characters, with no more than 2,048 characters in the path
    portion of the URL.May 1, 2009</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>If we don't use IE, should I be concerned about potentially exceeding the limit on the query string length? <em>I am certain I have seen the limit exceeded on my Node.js Express server, specifically when I included a base64 string representing an image in the query string of a GET request.</em></p>
  
  <p>What's a good way to get around this problem? Should we just use an HTTP POST request instead? Certainly we do not want to break apart 1 GET request into 1000's just to avoid this problem.</p>