Socket response buffering

Question

Hello,
I'm working on a project that retrieves partial content of very large files from a server using http. The intent is to read only the header of the file and then close the connection. Here is an example code snippet;
public void readUsingUrlConnection(Url url) {
        URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
        conn.connect();
        InputStream is = conn.getInputStream();
        //read and process is...
}Using ethereal, we have noticed that the server immediately sends data following the call to getInputStream before the client code begins reading off the input stream. In fact, the server sends a lot more data then the client needs to parse the header (~74K). So obviously this data is being buffered on the client side, but how is this buffer size controlled? Is the buffering occuring at the OS level?
We have tried to implement this code at the socket level using setSendBufferSize, but the buffer size seems to have no relation to the amount of data being sent from the server.
Any suggestions or hints as to how to control the data flow?
Thanks!

Answer 1

Err, the send buffer is for sending. Try
controlling the receive buffer.Oops, I meant "receive", but my hands and keyboard conspired to type "send".
I have since been able to adjust the size of the receive buffer. Well, sort of. I have not been able to set the receive buffer size to a value less than 16k. If i selected a value less than 16k, the getReceiveBufferSize was returning 4k, but ethereal showed my window size on acks still being set to 64k. I'm guessing 16k is a hardware limitation for ethernet?