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I was wondering what optimisations I could make to my server to better it's performance at handling file uploads/downloads.

At the moment I am thinking Apache2 may not be the best HTTP server for this?

Any suggestions or optimisations I could make on my server?

My current set up is an Apache2 HTTP server with PHP dealing with the file uploads which are currently stored in a folder out of the web root and randomly assigned a name which is stored in a MySQL database (along with more file/user information).

When a user wants to download a file, I use the header() function to force the download and readfile() to output the file contents.

Muggles
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1 Answers1

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You are correct that this is inefficient, but it's not Apache's fault. Serving the files with PHP is going to be your bottleneck. You should look into X-Sendfile, which allows you to tell Apache (via a header inserted by PHP) what file to send (even if it's outside the DocRoot).

The increase in speed will be more pronounced with larger files and heavier loads. Of course an even better way to increase speed is by using a CDN, but that's overkill for most of us.

Using X-Sendfile with Apache/PHP

http://www.jasny.net/articles/how-i-php-x-sendfile/

As for increasing performance with uploads, I have no particular knowledge. In general however, I believe each file upload would "block" one of your Apache workers for a long time, meaning Apache has to spawn more worker processes for other requests. With enough workers spawned, a server can slow noticeably. You may look into Nginx, which is an event-based, rather than process-based, server. This may increase your throughput, but I admit I have never experimented with uploads under Nginx.

Note: Nginx uses the X-Accel-Redirect instead of X-Sendfile.

http://wiki.nginx.org/XSendfile

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