Strange PHP error, where does it come from? Codeigniter

Question

Today i was making a file upload for avatars, everything works great, it resizes the images etc, but occasionally when selecting a large and invalid file it produces this error :

Warning: POST Content-Length of 52091839 bytes exceeds the limit of 8388608 bytes in Unknown on line 0
You did not select a file to upload.

This does not happen all the time, just occasionally. Normally it just gives the correct error message when a file is too big.

Does anyone have an idea where this error comes from, and why it shows?

Thanks!

If the answer doesn't work you may want to look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6315358/php-warning-post-content-length-of-113-bytes-exceeds-the-limit-of-1988100096-b — Sylwester, Aug 26 '12 at 18:41

Michael Berkowski · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-26T18:48:51.553

5

Sounds like you need to increase post_max_size in php.ini. If you have not already also increased upload_max_filesize, you are likely to need to increase it as well.

# php.ini
# Allow huge files:
# Post usually needs to be bigger than file upload size!
post_max_size = 256M
upload_max_filesize 128M

edited Aug 26 '12 at 18:48

answered Aug 26 '12 at 18:36

Michael Berkowski

267,341
46
444
390

Thats not the problem i think, because if i have a file that is too big to post it shows the correct error : The uploaded file exceeds the maximum allowed size in your PHP configuration file. this is a different error which i havent setup anywhere – user1362916 Aug 26 '12 at 18:39
@user1362916 The two directives will cause different errors. Make sure both are large enough. – Michael Berkowski Aug 26 '12 at 18:41

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 26 '12 at 18:42

Update your post_max_size in php.ini to a larger value

upload_max_filesize sets the max file size that a user can upload while post_max_size sets the maximum amount of data that can be sent via a POST in a form. That might be the reason why you get big file error sometimes when you try upload a single file of large size but when you try to upload multiple files the above error is raised.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 26 '12 at 18:45

This has to do with the way the file is coded when uploaded.

Basically it is "seen" as a very large POST.

So you want your php.ini post_max_size larger than your upload_max_filesize value.

Depending on the encoding you use, it should be from 60% to 100% larger.

Otherwise you might have a max file size of 5 M, but this gets encoded to 8.01 M; when that happens, the check for file size passes, but the one for post body size fails. Hence your error.

Strange PHP error, where does it come from? Codeigniter

3 Answers3