Hello rouvas, Tuesday, December 14, 2004, 1:33:07 PM, you wrote: r> Why don't you take the PHP out of the loop entirely? r> Make a dir into the Apache area with a custom .htaccess r> (with usernames/passwords, etc) and put the required files there. Then the files have to be within the web root and it'll only take one person to share out the username/password. It needs controlling as to who can download and how many times. PHP has to be in the loop somewhere (although granted, not for the actual file delivery). r> From the thread I understood that you don't split the file into smaller r> chunks, but instead server chunks from the same big file. This is bad r> practice, as I've found out from personal experience. It is better to serve r> small files as they finish earlier and free the server processes. What's the difference between serving a small 1MB file, and reading in 1MB of data from a 300MB file, closing that read operation and then outputting the result? I cannot see how actually splitting the file into 1MB chunks on the server will make it finish earlier. 1MB of data is 1MB of data, regardless how PHP read it in. The only real advantage might be in disk seek times however, so PHP wouldn't have to seek into the middle of a large file for example. r> Also, this would allow users that already have other download accelerators r> installed to grab the files. Download accelerators need a direct link to the file itself. The moment we have that, we're back to square one again. If it was that simple then when you buy something like a Symantec product on-line they'd just give you a link to the file. But they don't, you have to download their package installer app first. Large game downloads work in a similar way (Direct2Disk, Gigex Download, etc). I do not believe this is an uncommon practise, I just want my server to not get hammered. Best regards, Richard Davey -- http://www.launchcode.co.uk - PHP Development Services "I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
