Question

Is there a way to send a large (about >700mb) file to the Browser without exceeding memory in PHP?

I tried using fpassthru and readfile and it exceedet the memory limit.

Answer 1

The most efficient solution would be to use the X-Sendfile header, if your webserver supports it.

It means you don’t need to occupy PHP at all with serving the file, you just send the header and let the web server handle it.

Example (from the Apache mod_xsendfile page:)

header("X-Sendfile: $path_to_somefile");
header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"$somefile\"");
exit;