php - ajax GET failing when JSON content over 1MB on GoDaddy host

Question

I have a very simple ajax GET request in jquery that works just fine on my local test server. If I move the web page to a hosted server (GoDaddy) along with the php service it fails with a textStatus = "error" and errorThrown = "". Chrome displays

net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE.

This all happens within 1 second so it's not a timeout issue.

If I truncate the number of records so the json returned is less than 1MB it works fine.

If I call the server code from GoDaddy webpage to my local server for all records (1.8MB) all is fine too. The good returns from either site will complete in less than a second.

What could be causing GoDaddy to basically return no data when the json echo has more than 1MB of data in it?

The php server routine:

if (isset($_REQUEST['_SESSION'])) die("Get lost Dweeb!");
error_reporting(E_ALL | E_STRICT);
header('Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *');
$date_code = $_GET['date_code'];
$region = $_GET['region'];
$chargers = array();
$chg_count = 0;
$ftime = filemtime("chargers.json");

if ($ftime != $date_code) {
    $aTeslaChargers = json_decode(file_get_contents("chargers.json"),true);
    foreach($aTeslaChargers as $aTeslaCharger) {
        if ($aTeslaCharger['region'] == $region) {
            $chargers[] = $aTeslaCharger;
            $chg_count++;
            //if ($chg_count > 1972) break;
        }
    }
}
$json = json_encode(array(array("date_code" => $ftime), $chargers));
echo $json;

The javascript routine:

var url = 'https://www.website.com/get_data.php?date_code=0&region=north_america'; 

    var jqxhr = $.ajax({
                url: url,
                type: "GET",
                crossDomain: true
    })
    .done(function(response) {
        console.log(new Date());
        //var data = $.parseJSON(response);
        //console.log(data);
        console.log(response.length);
    })
    .fail(function(jqXHR, textStatus, errorThrown) {
        console.log(new Date());
        console.log(errorThrown);
    });

Answer 1

Well I stumbled onto a solution. It was to add a header statement just before the echo which seems to allow the echo to be larger than 1MB.

header("Content-Type: application/json");
echo json_encode(array(array("date_code" => $ftime), $chargers));

I now need to understand this more and check it across various browsers. Also interesting that the data was returned as an object now so no need to do json decode on it.

I suspect there is something in the GoDaddy service that defaulted the length but I am not sure. Again my server did not behave this way.