Uploads that fails is a big problem.

Unfortunatly there is nothing I can do about it, it's just the way HTTP and Apache works.

The reason behind it is the HTTP-method "POST" that is used by PHP to send a file to the web-server.

This is how it works (very simple):

The "Up-load" Form/Page is sent to you from the server, it contains the fields to handle the upload.

The webserver sits and waits, maintaining the connection, waiting for the POST-method to complete.

Now, when you hit the "Submit-Button" on the form, your web client starts to send the file to the server.

The big problem is that the server don't know about this, it is still waiting for the POST.

When the file is uploaded, the web-browser/Client sends the POST-Method and the server can deal with the allready uploaded data.

If then, the file is either very large or the "up-connection" from you is slow, then the server thinks that nothing is happening, and simply terminates the connection.

Obviously when the server terminates the connection, everything is lost, totally.

To make things even more complicated,this site is hosted on a load-balanced server-cluster, where a sheduler is regulary cleaning up what it thinks is lost garbage and closing connections that it thinks is runaway.

These time-outs depends on various things, such as serverload and network load.

Sometimes you can without problems upload 100MB file and sometimes even 20MB is lost.

Now, there are ways to workaround these problems, unfortunatly the creators of these free portal-systems don't understand the problems, and subsequently don't want to implement then into the CMS, belive me, I have begged on my bare knees.

To my knowledge there is two ways to do it, I have tested both, and they work flawless.

My problem is that I don't have enough knowledge to implement them into either JOOMLA nor RESPOSITORY.

The two workarounds is either implement a FLASH-uploader or a tiny JAVA-FTP-client.

The FTP-client works this way:

Within the Up-load form there is a JAVA-script based FTP-client that emulates a proper FTP-client within the web-browser.

This FTP-client connects to one of several FTP-accounts, uploads the file(s) calls another PHP-script that the upload is completed.

The PHP-script then takes the FormData, supplied by the FTP-client moves the file from the Temp-upload folder and then updates the database.

The FLASH-uploader works in a simmilar way.

But as I said, the Community does not seem to understand the problem with large file-uploads within a hosted enviroment, so I'm stuck at the moment

 

For now, if you have a problem, drop me a message and I'll sort it out

 

Regards Tomas