Frontend Canister Upgrade Fails with 'malformed_request'

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1

Hello everyone, I have a React + Vite frontend already deployed to the mainnet. My build output is in dist/. The assets folder in dist/assets contains all of my app’s compiled JS files. This folder is about 2.9MB in total, with some individual files as large as 900KB each. Assets are already gzip-compressed.

When I try to upgrade or reinstall this frontend canister (dfx canister install --mode upgrade --network ic), I get this error:

Failed to create chunks
The replica returned an HTTP Error: status 400 Bad Request
error: malformed_request
details: HTTP body reading timed out

Interestingly, if I remove a few large files to bring the dist/assets under 2MB, the deploy works fine (my frontend can’t display properly without those files, though). I have enough cycles to run the commands.

Could this be because of the 2MB limit? I thought it applied to individual files, and none of my files are over 1MB. Any workaround for this issue?

2

No, if file size was an issue you would not get malformed_request but something like ingress message size exceeded limit. I do not know what this could stem from. Does this reliably happen? Could you send me a reproduction?

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3

Yes, it happens every time whenever the total size of the dist/assets is above 2MB. It only works if I remove a few individual JS bundles that are 700-900kb, which brings the total size of the folder below 2MB.

I have created a minimal reproduction here: GitHub-repo
It includes the actual compiled dist/ folder.

Note that, however, it works fine locally, both upgrading and deploying. The error only occurs when deploying to mainnet.

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