Large php file upload

Question

heys guys.

So... I have a website that needs to upload files like, 500MB large.

My question is... what kind of system requirements do I need? Specifically about memory. For uploading a 500MB file I need 500MB RAM? How much RAM will be necessary for ONE upload of that kind succeed?

[What kind of questions can I ask here?](http://stackoverflow.com/faq#questions) — Chris, Feb 05 '13 at 18:23
This might help http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11590395/php-uploading-large-files — Philippe Boissonneault, Feb 05 '13 at 18:23
@Chris what's the problem with my question? I'm just a bit of a hurry... — lucaswxp, Feb 05 '13 at 18:27
This is no programming question. You should try it on http://serverfault.com/ — Chris, Feb 05 '13 at 18:31
You want your site to upload files to somewhere or you want to upload files to the site? — Sean McSomething, Feb 05 '13 at 19:03

hek2mgl · Accepted Answer · 2013-02-05T18:38:05.583

1

PHP, or better the web server, will not buffer the whole upload in RAM.

Upload size depends not directly on RAM size. I cannot say what exactly your system should look like but I can say that I handled GB sized updates years ago with low cost work station.

Note that you'll have to change the following php.ini settings if you want to support big uploads:

upload_max_filesize = '500M';

post_max_size = '500M';

About memory again: Note that not PHP will consume the memory. The web server will handle the download. You won't worry about this in PHP.

If you use a Linux system you can view the tcp buffer size when typing

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_rmem

in terminal. You'll see 3 numbers. The minimum, medium and maximum buffer size in bytes. On my system it is:

4096    87380   4115680

Meaning that the maximum buffer size is ~3.9MB which is significantly smaller then the 500MB you have.

So don't worry about memory in this case. Its is very likely that the network is the bottleneck.

edited Feb 05 '13 at 18:38

answered Feb 05 '13 at 18:22

hek2mgl

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I suspected... do you have any ideia of how much RAM will be buffered at time? – lucaswxp Feb 05 '13 at 18:25
Yes. I'm aware of upload_max_fielsize and post_max_size, now I need to know about memory usage. Should I worry about exhausting 128MB RAM? – lucaswxp Feb 05 '13 at 18:29
I would assume the amount of memory actually used will be quite low. The file is likely read in by the server as a stream and written directly to a tmp file which you then copy to the correct location with your language of choice. – Chris Christensen Feb 05 '13 at 18:30
I'm not sure how to test this... plus I don't have direct access to the server. – lucaswxp Feb 05 '13 at 18:30
On your dev box, set the max memory that your web server can use to 128MB and test it. You could go as far as creating a VM that matches your production environment if you wanted. – Chris Christensen Feb 05 '13 at 18:32

Large php file upload

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