I recently came across a HTTP 413 error on a friends site. My goal was to track down the error and make it pay... it was pure blood lust.

The site, then using the Thesis theme for Wordpress, would give the following error when attempting to update the theme's built in menu -

"Request Entity Too Large"

"The requested resource
/wp-admin/admin-post.php
does not allow request data with POST requests, or the amount of data provided in the request exceeds the capacity limit"

So, as usual I did a Google search, using the full text of the error, occationally throwing in the webhost (Dreamhost) or Thesis theme. All of them returned information that the error was generic... increase the memory allocated in php.ini... add a line to the wp_config.php file... 

However, one post also mentioned that sometimes Google Analytics would add corrupted code to the footer. This gave me an idea. I pulled up the webpage source and saw this... 

All that crap was on the page... at the top, not the bottom, and it was eating up memory when the admin tried to update the settings from the Thesis admin page. The data looked to be a corrupted upload of the sites favicon file. That chunk of code was HUGE. It was well over three full pages on the source view.

I ened up going into the database and deleteing the code chunk from the field, then launching the Thesis admin pannel to see if it fixed it. Viola! It was fixed and back to a fresh install state where my friend had to reset / reenter all of the data into the Thesis config pannels. 

Hey... it worked.