Question

Using PHP, I am trying to serve large files (up to possibly 200MB) which aren’t in a web accessible directory due to authorization issues. Currently, I use a readfile() call along with some headers to serve the file, but it seems that PHP is loading it into memory before sending it. I intend to deploy on a shared hosting server, which won’t allow me to use much memory or add my own Apache modules such as X-Sendfile.

I can’t let my files be in a web accessible directory for security reasons. Does anybody know a method that is less memory intensive which I could deploy on a shared hosting server?

EDIT:

if(/* My authorization here */) {
        $path = "/uploads/";
        $name = $row[0];           //This is a MySQL reference with the filename
        $fullname = $path . $name; //Create filename
        $fd = fopen($fullname, "rb");
        if ($fd) {
            $fsize = filesize($fullname);
            $path_parts = pathinfo($fullname);
            $ext = strtolower($path_parts["extension"]);
            switch ($ext) {
                case "pdf":
                header("Content-type: application/pdf");
                break;
                case "zip":
                header("Content-type: application/zip");
                break;
                default:
                header("Content-type: application/octet-stream");
                break;
            }
            header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=\"".$path_parts["basename"]."\"");
            header("Content-length: $fsize");
            header("Cache-control: private"); //use this to open files directly
            while(!feof($fd)) {
                $buffer = fread($fd, 1*(1024*1024));
                echo $buffer;
                ob_flush();
                flush();    //These two flush commands seem to have helped with performance
            }
        }
        else {
            echo "Error opening file";
        }
        fclose($fd);

Answer 1

If you use fopen and fread instead of readfile, that should solve your problem.

There’s a solution in the PHP’s readfile documentation showing how to use fread to do what you want.