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I am a developing a website that involves uploading videos above 50MB.

Which is a better (faster) way of uploading the files to server:

  1. uploading the video files via ftp

or

  1. uploading the files via a form

Thanks

Ogugua Belonwu
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5 Answers5

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The best way would be with FTP.

JoeyH
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  • which do you think is the fastest? – Ogugua Belonwu Jun 16 '11 at 18:57
  • The reason I did say FTP is because many FTP servers and clients support file upload resume. If for some reason your file upload fails, FTP can resume where the file upload left off. – JoeyH Jun 16 '11 at 18:59
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FTP is much faster for larger file sizes. File sizes that are below 1MB won't matter as much.

P.S. If you are not the one uploading, then think which is easier for your users. Form is easier but ftp is still faster.

Xplane
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  • No it isn't, I bet if you give it a try you won't even notice the difference. – fijter Jun 16 '11 at 19:03
  • @fijter Small files yes however it does depend on the size really. The larger the file, the greater the difference you will see. 50MB is enough to see a difference even if it is 5seconds. But that is 5 seconds you wouldn't of had! – Xplane Jun 16 '11 at 19:09
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For user experience you should go with the form file upload; The speed of both depend on the internet connection speed and load of the server and client and won't differ that much. It might be a bit much for your webserver if it's handling a lot of users but you can use for example nginx to make that less of a problem.

edit: here a comparison: http://daniel.haxx.se/docs/ftp-vs-http.html

fijter
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I use Jupload

It splits the files and uploads them via http. It's also good because you don't need to care about file upload limitations in server config. Speed depends mostly on the client connection info both for HTTP and FTP. Of course there are some differences but not at all so big between them.

Romeo M.
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Why not offer both? (Seriously - I wrote an app about ten years ago that did this.) Look up "MOVEit DMZ" or research various FTP servers with web portal integration to see how it's being done today.

There's also a third way you should consider and was touched on by the Jupload comment: a local control (Flash, Java, ActiveX, Firefox plug-in, etc. that optimizes the upload experience). If people are uploading multiple large files to your site they may appreciate the speed/reliability boost.

ftexperts
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