Subject: [LON-CAPA-dev] File Uploads and Size Limits

From: Mark Lucas <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:18:36 -0400

Hi,

I've had my access servers crashing here. As I mentioned in an earlier
post, perhaps on loncapa-admin, it's the time of the quarter when the
students are submitting their lab reports online, so there is a
suspicious correlation.

Last night I plowed through the log files and found that one fellow
seemed to be the culprit this time around. We tracked him down and found
that he was trying to upload an 85MB docx file. Don't ask me why it's
that big - I haven't been brave enough to open it yet!

For some reason this was taking a machine and causing the memory to run
away. This doesn't totally make sense, as there should have been plenty
of memory for an 85MB file, but stuff gets passed around and it may be
that multiple copies of this file were being processed, other processes
were getting back up, etc....

What is the mechanism being used for upload? It looks like POST. Are
there intrinsic limits to an HTML Post?

We've asked before, and it seems to be more of an issue now - is there a
way we can check the size of an uploaded file before it is uploaded and
refuse it? We'd like to be able to set a limit on a particular upload as
a problem parameter.

Any advice would be welcome!

Thanks!
Mark