read_file and force_download, memory limits?

[eluser]darrenm[/eluser]
I've just finished a project that had just this problem.

There are two php.ini settings that are likely to give you trouble:

memory_limit and max_execution_time

If you use force_download() to serve the file in one go, you're likely to have trouble with memory_limit (you'll probably need double the size of your file). The alternative is to use something like this:

Code:

$handle = @fopen($path,"r");
if ($handle) {
   while (!feof($handle)) {
      $buffer = fgets($handle);
      echo $buffer;
   }
   fclose($handle);
}

Which serves the file one line at a time. The danger in that is that you'll hit max_execution_time. Fortunately for my project the host had that set to 50000 so it was never an issue. had it been a problem I was going to see if I could reset the ini value regularly within the loop.