[Owncloud] ownCloud and big files (>2GB+)

[Milovan Krivokapic]

Hello all,

First, I would like to say that you did an amazing work with ownCloud
and I congratulate you for that! It works pretty nice, UI is also clean
and easy. With incoming mobile apps, I think you pretty much covered a
lot with only three releases so far.

Now, I have a couple of technical questions.

Is there a limit of maximum file size that ownCloud supports?
What we are trying to achieve is to allow upload of very large files
(typically 2-10GB file size) in ownCloud, but the maximum we managed to
work out was 1GB file size. We searched a lot before we came here and
tried various solutions but we weren't able to upload file larger than 1GB.

Just in case anyone else wants to do similar, here is our ownCloud
server settings.  Note that you might not need every setting we did.  We
would really appreciate your feedback regarding these settings so we can
document for other ownCloud users as well.  Our setting:
 
-changes in apache2.conf:
timeout 600

-changes in php.ini:
max_execution_time 6000 // maximum time (in seconds) a php-process may live
max_input_time 6000 // maximum time (in seconds) a php-process may live
memory_limit 512 // maximum amount of memory a process may use
post_max_size 5000M // max-filesize you can upload (for several files)
upload_max_file_size 5000M // max-filesize you can upload (for one file)
max_file_uploads 20 // maximum number of parallel file uploads
session.gc_maxlifetime 14400 // session duration
session.cookie_lifetime 0 // session duration
upload_tmp_dir = /proj // custom PHP tmp folder

Note that setting "upload_tmp_dir = /proj" allowed us upload up to 1GB
file size.  Where /proj is mounted partition (around 66GB).
Server: Debian Testing (Wheezy) 3GB RAM, 2 cores.

The initial problem seemed to be that default /tmp folder was around
780MB (tmpfs). Setting other tmp folder allowed us to upload files up to
1GB but anything larger fails (even though there is plenty of free
space). We watched file size growth (df -ha) and after 1.1GB it goes to
180MB and then temp file disappears and ownCloud throws max_file_size
error in HTML form. We used git version and correctly set quota in admin
settings for users (100GB). We don't know why ownCloud keeps failing
uploading files larger than 1GB (also we tested with WebDAV protocol
through Dolphin, and it throws error "Connection broken" on 99% (but it
actually failed much earlier just like uploading through web interface)).

We are very interested to help out and even contribute to the
development as much as possible so ownCloud can accept pretty large
files (for example like Dropbox can). We would really appreciate any
tips and starting points so we can together make this goal successful.
We are not 100% sure if its the only "limiting" factor some PHP setting,
its int max value (we used 64bit) or some ownCloud upload handling
problem, but we think this discussion might come up with some nice ideas
and potential solutions that we can implement together (file upload in
chunks maybe?).

Kind regards,
Milovan Krivokapic
Kontrola Konsalting d.o.o.