Hello All,
I am trying to write a web app. One feature enables the user to upload large files. if the file say 200MB, would it be faster to slice it as it uploads or would it be better to upload it all at once. (do not know much about it) what are your thoughts and can you shed some light on how to code it.
thank you as always.
cheers.

Hrmm.... that wouldn't make much sense.

You mean server-side putting it into a few different files then putting it back together? I just don't get why that would make sense. If you are talking about "slicing" it client-side, well that won't happen with just PHP.

I want to make it not limited tied to restrictions, would php make it possible to upload say 1GB file or would it time out and cause issues?
My main concern is not to have the client download any additional plugins for their browser, if slicing works best, then shed some light on it please as I am not well aware of it :)
thank you

If you want to upload huge files, then you will need to look at another technology: Java would be well suited for this, I believe.

It would be possible to upload large files with PHP, as long as you can modify the server's PHP settings. 1Gig is a bit of an unreasonable size for a PHP upload, but it should be possible. You would need to increase the max execution time, as well as the max size of posted items to allow the PHP script to execute correctly...

it would be more like 500MB files or so.
would java integration with php help in any way? do I need to load anything on the IIS6 server to support java, or is that just the script slient-side?

Java will intergrate with php easily enough if you know what your doing. I wouldent go as far as 1GB or even 500MB with PHP.

If you're using php to upload files you will always be limited why the limits that your host provides. They are there for a reason as using php to upload or download files that large is pretty resource intensive.

There are a few Perl solutions out there designed for large files and as kcackler said, this may be a good use for Java or a similar client side technology.

there are lots of java scripts out there, just search around

Do it with flash. Then you can implement a progress bar. There are a ton of tutorials on it.

Slicing the file size is silly though.

flash upload is utterly unreliable, uploads just die for no reason...

flash upload is utterly unreliable, uploads just die for no reason...
I've never had a problem with it. I used it to upload MP3 files in large amounts (8 or so at a time), and there were never any issues.