How to handle large file uploads ?

Uploading large files directly to a web server can cause timeouts and slow down your application. Let's look at how to handle large file uploads efficiently.

The simplest approach is to upload files directly to your web server. But this has several problems. Large files consume server memory and CPU, making your application less responsive. If the upload fails midway, you have to start over. Additionally, storing files on web servers makes scaling difficult.

A better solution is to use a dedicated object storage service like Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage. Instead of uploading files to your web server, clients upload directly to the storage service. This approach has several benefits:

1. Your web servers stay lightweight and responsive

2. Storage services are optimized for handling large files

3. You get built-in scalability and redundancy

But uploading large files to storage services can still fail. To handle this, we can use multipart uploads. Here's how it works:

1. Split the large file into smaller chunks

2. Upload each chunk separately

3. When all chunks are uploaded, combine them on the storage service

This approach has several advantages:

• Failed uploads can resume from the last successful chunk

• Multiple chunks can upload in parallel, improving speed

• Memory usage stays low since we're handling smaller pieces

Here's a comparison of different upload approaches: