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Accepted
jayarjo
Asked: 2010-02-24 10:28:34 +0800 CST

Is there some limit on a size of a file when force-downloading it with PHP on Apache?…

  • 772

Trying to force-download file with PHP using usual:

header("Content-type: $type" );
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=$name");
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($path));

And it does successfully for files somewhere below 32 mb. For bigger ones it just returns zeroed file.

Obviously there's some kind of limit, but what sets it? Using Apache 2.2.11 and PHP 5.3.0.

I asked this question on stackoverflow but they said that it better fits here. I'm not personally sure since I do not know what causes it in first place. Maybe it's Apache?

php apache-2.2 limitations restrictions

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    readfile() buffers the entire file in memory before streaming it back to the client. In your php.ini you've probably got

    memory_limit=32M

    Either raise that, or spool the file in smaller chunks 

    <?php 
function readfile_chunked ($filename) { 
  $chunksize = 1*(1024*1024); // how many bytes per chunk 
  $buffer = ''; 
  $handle = fopen($filename, 'rb'); 
  if ($handle === false) { 
    return false; 
  } 
  while (!feof($handle)) { 
    $buffer = fread($handle, $chunksize); 
    print $buffer; 
  } 
  return fclose($handle); 
} 
?>
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