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Asked: 2026-06-04T06:33:09+00:00

I’m trying to stream (large) files over HTTP into a database. I’m using Tomcat

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I’m trying to stream (large) files over HTTP into a database. I’m using Tomcat and Jersey as Webframework. I noticed, that if I POST a file to my resource the file is first buffered on disk (in temp\MIME*.tmp} before it is handled in my doPOST method.

This is really an undesired behaviour since it doubles disk I/O and also leads to a somewhat bad UX, because if the browser is already done with uploading the user needs to wait a few minutes (depending on file size of course) until he gets the HTTP response.

I know that it’s probably not the best implementation of a large file upload (since you don’t even have any resume capabilities) but so are the requirements. :/

So my questions is, if there is any way to disable (disk) buffering for MULTIPART POSTs. Mem buffering is obviously too expensive, but I don’t really see the need for disk buffering anyway? (Explain please) How do large sites like YouTube handle this situation? Or is there at least a chance to give the user immediate feedback if the file is sent? (Should be bad, since there could be still something like SQLException)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Your best bet is to take full control and write your own servlet that just grabs request.getInputStream (or request.getWriter if you are consuming text) and does the streaming itself. Most frameworks make your life “easy” by handling all the upload, temporary storage, etc. for you and often make it difficult to do things like streaming. It’s quite easy to grab the stream yourself and do whatever you want.

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