Manipulate an Archive in memory with PHP (without creating a temporary file on disk)

Question

I am trying to generate an archive on-the-fly in PHP and send it to the user immediately (without saving it). I figured that there would be no need to create a file on disk

Answer 1

Is there really a performance issue here, or does it just offend your sense of rightness? A lot of processes write temporary files and delete them, and often they never hit the disk due to caching.

A tempfile is automatically deleted when closed. That's it's nature.

There are only two ways I can think of to create a zip file in memory and serve it and both are probably more trouble than they are worth.

• use a ram disk.
• modify the ziparchive class to add a method that does everything the close() method does, except actually close the file. (Or add a leave-open parameter to close()).
  This might not even be possible depending on the underlying C libraries.