Reduce memory consumption in PHP while handling uploads by php input

Question

I have nginx 1.0.5 + php-cgi (PHP 5.3.6) running. I need to upload ~1GB files (1-5 parallel uploads must be). I trying to create uploading of big files through ajax upload. Everything is working but PHP eating a lot of memory for each upload. I have set memory_limit = 200M, but it's working up to ~150MB size of uploaded file. If file is bigger - uploading fails. I can set memory_limit bigger and bigger, but I think it's wrong way, cause PHP can eat all memory. I use this PHP code (it's simplified) to handle uploads on server side:

$input = fopen('php://input', 'rb');
$file = fopen('/tmp/' . $_GET['file'] . microtime(), 'wb');
while (!feof($input)) {
    fwrite($file, fread($input, 102400));
}
fclose($input);
fclose($file);

/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

user www-data;
worker_processes 100;
pid /var/run/nginx.pid;

events {
        worker_connections 768;
        # multi_accept on;
}

http {

        ##
        # Basic Settings
        ##

        sendfile on;
        tcp_nopush on;
        tcp_nodelay on;
        keepalive_timeout 65;
        types_hash_max_size 2048;
        client_max_body_size 2g;
        # server_tokens off;
        server_names_hash_max_size 2048;
        server_names_hash_bucket_size 128;

        # server_names_hash_bucket_size 64;
        # server_name_in_redirect off;

        include /etc/nginx/mime.types;
        default_type application/octet-stream;

        ##
        # Logging Settings
        ##

        access_log /var/log/nginx/access.log;
        error_log /var/log/nginx/error.log;

        ##
        # Gzip Settings
        ##

        gzip on;
        gzip_disable "msie6";

        include /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf;
        include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

/etc/nginx/sites-enabled/srv.conf:

server {
    listen  80;
    server_name srv.project.loc;

    # Define root
    set $fs_webroot "/home/andser/public_html/project/srv";
    root $fs_webroot;
    index   index.php;

    # robots.txt
    location = /robots.txt {
        alias $fs_webroot/deny.robots.txt;
    }

    # Domain root
    location / {
        if ($request_method = OPTIONS ) {
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "http://project.loc";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET, OPTIONS, POST";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Authorization,X-Requested-With,X-File-Name,Content-Type";
            #add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "*";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Credentials "true";
            add_header Access-Control-Max-Age "10000";
            add_header Content-Length 0;
            add_header Content-Type text/plain;
            return 200;
        }
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    #error_page  404  /404.htm

    location ~ index.php {
        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:9000;
        fastcgi_index   index.php;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME $fs_webroot/$fastcgi_script_name;
        include fastcgi_params;
        fastcgi_param   REQUEST_METHOD  $request_method;
        fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO   $fastcgi_script_name;

        add_header Pragma no-cache;
        add_header Cache-Control no-cache,must-revalidate;
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
        #add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Content-Type, X-Requested-With, X-File-Name";
    }
}

Anybody knows the way to reduce memory consumption by PHP? Thanks.

Answer 1

There's a hack, which is about faking content type header, turning it from application/octet-stream to multipart/form-data. It will stop PHP from populating $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA. More details https://github.com/valums/file-uploader/issues/61.

Answer 2

Have been in the same shoe before and this is what i did split the files into different chunks during the upload process.

I good example is using [1]: http://www.plupload.com/index.php "pulpload" or trying using a java applet http://jupload.sourceforge.net which also has resume capability when there are network issues etc.

The most important thing is that you want your files uploaded via a web browser there is noting stopping you from doing so in chunks