I'm practicing some file upload with PHP and I was uploading a file numerous times, so I wanted to make sure I wasn't taking up a lot of space on the server. I had a while loop go over every file in the php tmp directory, and there were 103,988 entries.
Is this more than normal? I had assumed the tmp directory was for files that were automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. Am I supposed to be managing this folder some how?
Part of the reason I ask is because I'm writing an app that takes a users file, changes some things, and serves it back to them. I want the file to be deleted once they leave, but I'm not sure what the best way to do it is. Should I have a folder I put all the files in and use cron to delete files older than a certain time?
General rule is that you should clean up after yourself whenever possible.
If you aren't sure that you can remove temporary files every time, it is a good idea to have a cron job doing this for you once in a while.
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I've created a webapp that converts videos that you upload into a compilation. Locally it works perfectly because the files are simply uploaded to a folder in my project folder and the script then simply takes all the files it can find in that folder and convert it into one compilation.
However, if want to put this online and have multiple users use this webapp, I can no longer use this one folder obviously. That's where I am stuck, I don't know how I can make sure different people can upload their files simultaneously, and the script knows what files to take, and at the end delete them, once users are done with the site.
I thought maybe something with sessions or with temporary generated folders, but that is a guess. The entire website is just one page. I don't want to require users to login to use the app.
I'm very stuck and hope someone can at least point me in the right direction. Thanks!
I've just published a client website, it's primary purpose is distributing content from other sources, so it's regularly pulling in text, videos, images and audio from external feeds.
It also has an option for client to manually add content to be distributed.
Using PHP all this makes a fair bit of use of copy() to copy files from another server, move_uploaded_file() to copy manually uploaded files, and it also uses SimpleImage image manipulation class to make multiple copies, and crop etc..
Now to the problem: in amongst all of this, some temp files are not being deleted, it's locking up the server pretty quickly as when tmp is full it causes things like mysql errors and stops pages loading.
I've spent a lot of time googling which leads me to one thing: "temp files are deleted when the script is finished executing" - this is clearly not the case here.
Is there anything i can do to make sure any temporary files created by the scripts are deleted?
I've spoken to my server guy who suggested running a cron that will delete from it every 24 hours, i don't know whether this is a good solution but it's certainly not THE solution as i believe the files should be getting deleted? what could be a cause of stoping files from being deleted?
Regardless of anything else you come up with, the cron idea is still a good one, as you want to make sure that /tmp is getting cleaned up. You can have the cron job delete anything older than 24 hours, not delete everything every 24 hours, assuming this leaves enough space.
In terms of temp files deleting when the script is done. This only happens when tmpfile () is used to creat the temp file in the first place, as far as I know. So other files created in /tmp by other means (and there would be many other means) will not just go away because the script is done.
I am just currently wondering how I can backup a folder which contains 8000+ images without the script timing out, the folder in all contains around 1.5gb of data, which we need to backup ourselves every so often.
I have tried the zip functionality provided in PHP, however it simply times out the request due to the huge number of files needed to be backed up, it does however work with smaller amounts of work.
I am trying to run this script through a HTTP REQUEST, would putting it through a Cronjob ignore the timeout?
Does anyone have any recommendations?
I would not use php for that.
If you are on linux I would setup a cron job and to run a program like rsync periodically.
A nice introduction about rsync.
Edit: If you do want / need to go the php way, you can also consider just copying instead of using zip. zip normally doesn't do much with images and if you have a database already, you can check your current directory against the database and just do a differential backup (just copy the new files). That way only your initial backup would take a long time.
You can post the code so we can optimize it, other than that, you should change your php.ini (configuration file) and remove/increase the timeout (the longest time your script can run on your server)
I have a site with thousands of posts. Each post got 0-4 pictures. The pictures are in a folder system. Now I need to move all the pictures into another folder system with different hierarchy logic.
I could easily write a PHP code for this, but I guess that I can't succesfully run a file with that amount of to do. So how can I run a php file like this long enough, or what are the other possibilities?
You can write it in PHP because PHP - on the command-line - has no execution time limit. It will run endlessly if the script takes that long.
Contact your hoster for shell access.
I am currently using php and ajax file upload to develop a web application.
in a web application involves getting the files uploaded from user, e.g email client, photo gallery. This is the scenario that i got stuck.
When user uploads some files but close the browser without submit, i want to delete those files　and only move the relevant files.
I have tried leave the stuff in tmp/ folder and been given a temp name by apache but when i do the upload i have to move the file immediately otherwise the file cannot be found in the later stage by referencing to the temp filename.
The reason that i leave it in a /tmp/ is that i will want to setup a cron job and delete files in those folder to free up server space.
Am i doing the right thing? or is there a standard industry approach used by hotmail, google etc?
You will need another temporary folder which you can manage yourself.
You can upload to this folder you created yourself called temp. When the uploading is complete, move the temporary file from PHP's tmp folder into your temp folder.
Then when the submission is done, you move the file away into its respective folders.
Have a cron job that works background to remove old files in that folder.
Remember to give permissions to PHP, Apache and the cron job for access to the folder.
Don't rely on industrial standards - besides, Microsoft and Google don't use PHP. (maybe Google, but definitely not Microsoft).
Why not just move it from the tmp/ folder to your own temporary staging folder immediately, and then keep a reference to it in the DB, and have a cron job that periodically scans the DB for 'staging' files with a timestamp more than X hours in the past and removes them?
I dont know about big boys, but I guess, you can create a database table, that will hold the temporary file names, the pros of this approach is that, you can delete the entry from temporary file table, even browser is not closed in the middle, and additionally setting up cron job to delete files as found under temporary file table.