PHP.INI file - Maybe some hosting advice

PHP
1

For some reason, Fatcow’s hosting only allows a 60 second upload time. This seems way weird to me, but shared hosting is what it is. Still, i had a support ticket that seemed to go kind of oddly, i’m wondering what the experts think. I’m going to lay it out here, but to cut to the chase of their solution: write a script that constantly sends the data back to the server to make them know that things are working and it isn’t stalled, something like progress bar indicating the script processing the session progress.

Here’s how the support ticket went. Is the weird??? Think i need to get different hosting?
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Subject: PHP Max Upload Size : 2MB
ME:
I’m attempting to use a video plugin in Wordpress, but it’s saying that the PHP Max Upload Size is only 2 MB. This is no good. Can i change this through my control panel?
THEM:
I have increased the memory limit in the php.ini file to 64MB. You can edit the php.ini file at: http://members.fatcow.com/member/cgiManagement/PHPplus.bml .
ME:
Thanks for your help. This has partially helped the situation. I have larger videos that take longer than 60 seconds to upload. I attempted to change the timing limitations on the PHP.INI file (somewhat blindly - not sure what does what), but i don’t think it’s changing anything. I also just read in your FAQ "FatCow cannot allow custom scripts to impact the performance of other customer sites on our shared hosting platform. "; and therefore are killed after 60 seconds. This just won’t work for me. Sixty seconds isn’t long enough to upload my files. Can this be changed, or do i just need to find another host service that doesn’t have this limitation (I’m not trying to be rude, but, objectively, i just have to do something about this).
THEM:
The PHP script timeout period is set to 60 seconds on our server. It wouldn’t be possible for us to increase this as it would reduce the performance of everyone using that CGI server, since a runaway script would take that much longer before it is killed.

A solution for this is to write a script that constantly sends the data back to the server to make them know that things are working and it isn’t stalled, something like progress bar indicating the script processing the session progress.
ME:
That’s a great idea. I have no clue how to do that. I think it’s ridiculous that i would need to. Can’t your server tell the difference between a runaway script and something actively being uploaded without somebody like me having to babysit it self-made scripts?
THEM:
We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. You can check in the internet search engine for the specific codes.
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Thanks for reading - and any input. Also - it took me a while to figure out where to post this. If you think this thread would be better on another forum, let me know.

2

That’s actually all pretty standard. I don’t allow scripts longer than 15 seconds on my servers.

If you’re uploading big videos, you probably shouldn’t be trying to host them on a shared host… things won’t work well. You could get a video host (like fliqz or brightcove), or just host them on YouTube.

3

Okay. So “writing a script that constantly sends the data back to the server to make them know that things are working and it isn’t stalled, something like progress bar indicating the script processing the session progress.” isn’t so reasonable?

4

It’s not unreasonable at all. I had to create a script uploader the other day and had to do something similar.

Without doing something like that, PHP (or any computer program for that matter) has no way to tell if it’s stuck in an infinite loop or if it’s doing what it’s supposed to and just taking a while.

To be quite blunt, I think you were unnecessarily harsh and unreasonable with the guy trying to provide tech support…

5

Bluntness: you’re right.

Any tips out there for a preloader script?

Thanks for the advice.

6

I don’t know of any stand alone ones, but I know that Wordpress has a pretty decent uploader.

You might take a look at something like: Plupload - A tool for uploading files using Flash, Silverlight, Google Gears, HTML5 or Browserplus

What you want is an uploader that uploads in “chunks”. Basically, that means it breaks it into manageable pieces (chunks) and uploads them one at a time, which are then recombined on the server into one file. This will let the server know that it’s not stuck.