chunked file uploads with plupload
Holy tamole…
Have been wrestling with a client project using ‘plupload’ with a user base consistently uploading files from 150-500meg on a daily basis. They’d been uploading to youtube/vimeo mostly, because the experience with the older uploader (still plupload earlier version) was bad – slow, mostly, but some issues about determining whether items were uploaded/processed correctly (files sent to third party for processing).
Joined a project and the other dev had been working on a revamp, and had put some new things in place to help with logging/notifications/etc, but as we rolled it out to the main production site today, word had come back that “this is still really slow”.
I’ve only got 5mpbs up at the office, so it was hard for me to judge/test. Working with the PM, who had much faster upload, we tested a 344meg file. We got about 9:40 upload time. Ugh…
Spent a lot of time looking at lots of potential issues – any network throttling? Any firewall stuff? Error logs? Apache settings? Dug deeper and noticed that ‘chunk_size’ in plupload was set to 1m. Hrmm…. let’s change that to 5m.
Tested upload again, and got 5:12. Changed to 8m, got 4:40. Changed to 10m, got 4:39. Uploaded same file on vimeo.com and got 4:32, so we’re definitely in the ballpark on what the end users are accustomed to.
Whew… case solved…