Transferring large'ish amounts of data between servers

[ryanhellyer]

Hi,
Apparently Internet Exploder is limited to URLs of only 2,000 characters or so in length. But I need to send about 10,000 characters between two different servers so sending it via the URL isn't going to work

I've setup a test system which works by using readfile() to grab all the data from one server and placing it into a variable for use on the other server. Is this the standard way to do this? Or is there a better way to handle transferring large amounts of data between servers?

Thanks for any input you may have

[decowski]

It’s a bit like saying: “Hey, I need to travel from Berlin to Paris. I am driving a car. Is this a standard way to do this?”

It depends on what you’re trying to achieve. One thing to note is the way you’re doing it currently is OK if you only need to pull data. If you need to push it then you can use, for example, cURL.

[ryanhellyer]

Thanks

It’s a bit like saying: “Hey, I need to travel from Berlin to Paris. I am driving a car. Is this a standard way to do this?”

LOL. Point taken I guess I should have said "is this a reasonable way to do this?".

It all depends what you’re trying to achieve really. One thing to note is the way you’re doing it currently is OK if you only need to pull data. If you need to push it then you can use, for example, cURL.

I'm using a form to post the data to the other server and process it. That side of things is working fine, the only problem I have (had) is grabbing the processed data and sending the result back to the other server. If the way I'm doing it isn't totally stupid then I'll stick with it

[lampcms.com]

Tell us exactly what is it that you need to do. I mean what is in that data? how ofter do you want to transfer. Just describe the specific goals of that data transfer.
There are many ways to do a transfer, the most common one is to use FTP, then there is an rsync, then there is a possibility to mount a drive on one server as an nfs partition and then you can simple use that partition from the other server as if it was a local drive.

Then there is an option to just POST the data from one server using the http POST to a html form an another server.

You see, there are many ways to transfer a server, it all depends on your specific situation.

[ryanhellyer]

Hi,
Thanks for the reply. Another topic I made yesterday has converged on this one and this question is now being handled over there ... http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=611791

The following is the description I used in the other topic of what I'm trying to do:

I want to release a piece of software for download, which allows users to choose a bunch of different options. When they click submit, those options are sent through to my own server for processing. My server will process them and all the user to download CSS created during this processing (that's what the style.php file is for).

I could store everything on my own server, but I want to make the bulk of the software free to download so that users can modify it for their own purposes. However for commercial purposes I want to keep the core code which does the processing on my own server.


The catch here, is that the number of options in the form (test.php) will be quite large and so I can't just send the data back via the URL.

[logic_earth]

What you are looking for is a web service, to give it a name. Send one server a special formatted message either via post or get. The server then either sends raw text, html, or even XML data detailing rather the request failed or so forth.

[ryanhellyer]

Yep, that sounds like it.

I 'almost' have a working test system up and running now from help in my other topic If I run into any more problems I'll post back ... and try to make my questions clearer next time!

[REMIYA]

Hi,
Apparently Internet Exploder is limited to URLs of only 2,000 characters or so in length. But I need to send about 10,000 characters between two different servers so sending it via the URL isn't going to work

You can make Ajax frontend for interactive presentation to the end user, and PHP for backend sending of data. Then simply split and send the data in more reasonable packages. At the end join the data back in one piece.

[ryanhellyer]

You can make Ajax frontend for interactive presentation to the end user, and PHP for backend sending of data. Then simply split and send the data in more reasonable packages. At the end join the data back in one piece.

Nice suggestion. Unfortunately I know absolutely nothing about Ajax so I'd need to do a lot of background reading to get that working I think. I have a working solution which stores the data in temporary files which seems to be working fine so I'll probably stick with that for the mean time.