Possible to emulate flow control in HTTP protocol ? (raw HTTP protocol) - apache

Question

I have hundreds of hardware devices at customers which need to send HTTP data through a telnet interface.
The destination is an Apache 2 Webserver with a PHP script waiting for the data.
This is already working however we found that the hardware involved is not able to handle hw-flow-control, this means that once data is filled (around 250 bytes) the buffer can overflow resulting in data corruption.
Fixing the HW-flow is not an option, the "modem" firmware is closed and can not be modified by the vendor anymore as it's quite old hardware.
Normally we'd use this:
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: api.server
User-Agent: P8
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 767
VARIABLE=URLENCODED_DATA(total length 767 bytes)
This would work perfectly fine with flow-control, but in my case the 767 bytes are too much.
After around 200 bytes buffers would be overwritten and some bytes are lost.
The only current way to get it working now was using a delay when sending to the "modem" so it can empty it's buffers in time. However in the field this will not work due to instable internet connections with unpredictable timings.
I am not an expert in HTTP, I just hope it is possible to fragment a package.
I thought about using "Connection: keep-alive" or something similar.
My main question:
Is there a way to send POST data ($VARIABLE) to a Apache 2 server in smaller chunks in a way that makes the HTTP server combine them to one stream internally ?
Pseudo code:
POST / HTTP/1.1
Host: api.server
User-Agent: P8
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: */*
Content-Length: 400
Connection: keep-alive
VARIABLE=URLENCODED_DATA(200 bytes)
END\n\n
Server responds in TCP stream once received with "OK".
Next chunk is sent:
VARIABLE=URLENCODED_DATA(200 bytes)
Connection is closed.
As 400 bytes have been reached the process is ready, Apache forwards VARIABLE to PHP scripts POST input.
So like a HTTP flow-control within an open TCP connection.
Maybe there is a HTTP feature which is built for that purpose, or something that can be "ab"used to act in that way. keep-alive was just a guess.
If current HTTP protocols do not have such a feature the only way I can think about solving my issue is to implement flow-control on PHP side.
I hope for a better way than that though.
Update:
Meanwhile I found two interesting parameters:
Expect: 100-continue
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
What I would need is a mix of both.
A chunked transfer encoding which is expecting a 100-continue after each chunk !

Answer 1

This is a very interesting question, and it really has nothing to do with HTTP but with TCP.
The way to solve this is to use an intermediary proxy that takes care of spoon-feeding your devices. Ideally, this device will be able to set the window size on the TCP packet ACKs to whatever the size of the buffer the device is. That window size will close to zero when the device cannot handle any more. If you do this, you will be utilizing TCP's built-in flow control and solve the problem in a simple way.
Another thing you can do is keep this entirely in the application layer and have this intermediary proxy buffer all of the data from the response. For most normal HTTP responses this will be okay.