<p>I am writing a program in Python that will act as a server and accept data from a client, is it a good idea to impose a hard limit as to the amount of data, if so why?</p>

<p>More info:
So certain chat programs limit the amount of text one can send per send (i.e. per time user presses send) so the question comes down to is there a legit reason for this and if yes, what is it?</p>

What is your question exactly?
What happens when you do receive on a socket is that the current available data in the socket buffer is immediately returned. If you give receive (or read, I guess), a huge buffer size, such as 40000, it'll likely never return that much data at once. If you give it a tiny buffer size like 100, then it'll return the 100 bytes it has immediately and still have more available. Either way, you're not imposing a limit on how much data the client is sending you.