Why does OpenURI treat files under 10kb in size as StringIO?

Question

I fetch images with open-uri from a remote website and persist them on my local server within my Ruby on Rails application. Most of the images were shown without a problem,

Answer 1

When one does network programming, you allocate a buffer of a reasonably large size and send and read units of data which will fit in the buffer. However, when dealing with files (or sometimes things called BLOBs) you cannot assume that the data will fit into your buffer. So, you need special handling for these large streams of data.

(Sometimes the units of data which fit into the buffer are called packets. However, packets are really a layer 4 thing, like frames are at layer 2. Since this is happening a layer 7, they might better be called messages.)

For replies larger than 10K, the open-uri library is setting up the extra overhead to write to a stream objects. When under the StringMax size, it just includes the string in the message, since it knows it can fit in the buffer.