Question

I am using ZipArchive to incrementally zip a site. I call the script multiple times to ensure it doesn’t exceed to php max execution time.

This works fine on most web hosts. However for some hosts, calling close() on the archive is incredibly slow and results in the execution time being exceeded.

For example, on one host with a 30 second max execution time, I zip for 20 seconds and then call close but it does not make it in time.

I have tried PCLZip as an alternative. It is reliable but it is shockingly slow in comparison.

Any ideas on why it behaves this way and how it could be worked around?

Answer 1

Try running fopen/fwrite/fclose over ftp for example. You’ll notice fopen and fclose take a while to execute while fwrite is instant.

You might say “that can’t be right” fwrite sends the data over ftp everytime. I don’t know if it does or not but i bet it doesn’t and fclose sends all the batch work.

In a simmilar fashion ZipArchive::close may be finishing up everything you’ve structured till then and merging it into the final file.