Question

I have a check in place via php to determine if the file is to big, the problem is, user has to upload the file to the server first, before i can make the check.

So if someone wanted to waste my bandwidth, all they woudl have to do is rename a huge file to .jpg for example and upload it. And there is nothing i can do to stop them

There must be some way to prevent this. Some kind of a valid check or jquery or something.

I need a solution that would allow me to notify the user that the file he is trying to upload is too big.

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you’re concerned about wasting bandwidth, then you must handle this at a higher level in your server stack. By the time PHP is handling the file it’s too late, the upload has already occurred and the bandwidth consumed.

Apache has some configuration directives that may be useful:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/core.html#limitrequestbody

But I’m not sure if even that actually cuts off the request when the body exceeds the limit. If not, you’d have to move up yet another level and handle it at the TCP level.

If you do want to go down a non-PHP route to try to block large uploads, you should ask on ServerFault instead of StackOverflow.