4GB+ Upload in ASP.NET

[Uncle Ben]

I'm looking for an ASP.NET solution which will allow my website to receive
huge files in the size of 4GB and up.

This solution needs to be integrated with a front-end. Users will have to
populate some FORM fields and browse for the 4GB file. Upon FORM
submission, the application will collect both the FORM field data and the
4GB upload.

A file transfer progress bar would be nice too.

I think the current HTTP file transfer method will only support up to 2GB in
size. Please advise how I can support 4GB+ upload in ASP.NET websites.

Thank you in advance.

 

[Tampa.NET Koder]

4GB!! Do you really want to tick off your users by having them wait for a
4GB upload? The .NET runtime supports up to 4MB by default. You really need
to re-think what you are doing. Maybe a different protocal may be better.
Something like a bittorrent.

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

I seriously doubt that the HTML protocol will give you the possibility of
uploading a file of 2GB in size. For downloading, yes, but not for
uploading. (For the HTML protocol, uploading and downloading are two very
different things and these two cannot be mixed or switched over.)

Your only possibilities are to use FTP or to install a client application on
each user and tranfert your files the classic way over the socket.

For using an HTML Form to browse and upload the file to ASP.NET, forget it.

S. L.

 

[John Timney \(ASP.NET MVP\)]

You can do it - you'll have to work out how to stop the worker process
recycling at the machine level, and how to increase your script timeout to
cater for duration, somehow based on a likely variable upload speed from
clients - but its probably do-able. It is however a bit over ambitious to
even consider this when there are so many other solutions that are better
suited to this.

If it was me I would look to pipe this through some form of torrent client
as a seeded file to a torrent server, or get some IRC script and hack
together a client and server and use xdcc, or use ftp as its capable....http
would not be my first choice for this.

--
Regards

John Timney
ASP.NET MVP
Microsoft Regional Director

 

[Joerg Jooss]

I seriously doubt that the HTML protocol will give you the
possibility of uploading a file of 2GB in size.

There's no HTML protocol. I guess you mean HTTP? Rest assured that
uploading 4 GB over HTTP isn't an issue for the protocol.

Whether a specific file upload API can deal with these huge uploads is
a completely different story.

Cheers,

 

[Uncle Ben]

There's no HTML protocol. I guess you mean HTTP? Rest assured that
uploading 4 GB over HTTP isn't an issue for the protocol.

I thought there's a limit of 2 GB over HTTP? No?

Whether a specific file upload API can deal with these huge uploads is
a completely different story.

Is there one available? What do most people use in .NET to handle "large"
file upload reliably?

 

[Sylvain Lafontaine]

You're right, I mean the HTTP protocol, not the HTML protocol.

My point was about to remind that the HTTP protocol is not symetrical in its
conception: there are limitations on what you can send inside a POST query
made to a web server and the fact that you can download a file with a
relatively great size (I don't know the exact limit, 2G, 4G, none?) doesn't
mean that you can upload a file up to the same size because of the various
limits set on the web server.

I know that we can modify many of these limits but, for a file of a size of
up to 4G, I don't see the utility of even trying to do this instead of using
FTP.

S. L.

 

[Joerg Jooss]

You're right, I mean the HTTP protocol, not the HTML protocol.

My point was about to remind that the HTTP protocol is not symetrical
in its conception: there are limitations on what you can send inside
a POST query made to a web server and the fact that you can download
a file with a relatively great size (I don't know the exact limit,
2G, 4G, none?) doesn't mean that you can upload a file up to the same
size because of the various limits set on the web server.

You're right -- web servers or application servers will pose a problem
here rather than the protocol itself.

Cheers,

 

[Joerg Jooss]

I thought there's a limit of 2 GB over HTTP? No?

No. Why?