In a node.js server that accepts HTTPS post requests that are typically pretty large (a few MBs) we want to be able to start processing the requests before the entire thing is accepted by the server.
For example, if a request with a big fat body arrives, we want to look at its path and based on it decide whether to terminate/reject it, without having to wait for the entire request to arrive (and pay IO cost of receiving that fat body).
You could try the the Connect Limit middleware:
https://github.com/senchalabs/connect/blob/master/lib/middleware/limit.js
or, implement your own solution in a similar way by checking req.headers[content-length], etc..
Based on experimentation, it seems that Node.js only fires the request event after parsing the HTTP headers. Meaning there's a chance to examine the headers before we even start listening for the data event.
Thus the solution seems to be to check the headers before reading any data, and potentially rejecting the request at that point. If we don't reject at that point, we start accumulating the data buffers as they arrive and if they exceed the limit (and thus conflict with the reported content length) we have another chance to reject the request right there by calling response.end().