> Now for the real question: Is there a maximum length for the size of a
> string that can be sent through an ROS message? I have noticed that there
> seems to be a limit of about 475 characters after which it causes a buffer
> overflow (we have observed ROS completely crashing when a string of 476
> characters is sent but not when 475 are sent).
>

I don't know anything about rosjava, but I just tested roscpp in both 1.0
and 1.1 with string lengths in the tens of thousands without any problem.
roscpp in 1.0 can crash if it receives a malformed serialized message, which
may be what's happening -- do you have a callstack?  What nodes are
communicating?  rosjava <-> roscpp?

Josh