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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T06:14:32+00:00

Okay, I have a problem that I hope you can help me fix. I

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Okay, I have a problem that I hope you can help me fix.

I am running a server that stores video files that are very large, some up to 650 MB. I need a user to be able to request this page and have it download the file to their machine. I have tried everything, but a plain readfile() request hangs for about 90 seconds before quitting and gives me a “No data received error 324 code,” a chunked readfile script that I have found from several websites doesn’t even start a download, FTP through PHP solutions did nothing but give me errors when I tried to get the file, and the only cURL solutions that I have found just create another file on my server. That is not what I need.

To be clear I need the user to be able to download the file to their computer and not to the server.

I don’t know if this code is garbage or if it just needs a tweak or two, but any help is appreciated!

<?php

$fn = $_GET["fn"];

echo $fn."<br/>";

$url  = $fn;
$path = "dl".$fn;

$fp = fopen($path, 'w');

$ch = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);

$data = curl_exec($ch);

curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);

?>
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I wouldn’t recommend serving large binary files using PHP or any other scripting technology for that matter. They where never design for this — you can use apache, nginx or whatever standard http server you have on the back end. If you still need to use PHP, then you should probably check out readfile_chunked.

    http://php.net/readfile#48683
    and here’s a great tutorial.
    http://teddy.fr/blog/how-serve-big-files-through-php

    good luck.

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