Serving large files with PHP

Question

So I am trying to serve large files via a PHP script, they are not in a web accessible directory, so this is the best way I can figure to provide access to them.

The

Answer 1

If your files are not accessible by the web server because the path is not in your web serving directory (htdocs) then you can make a symbolic link (symlink) to that folder in your web serving directory to avoid passing all traffic trough php.

You can do something like this

ln -s /home/files/big_files_folder /home/www/htdocs

Using php for serving static files is a lot slower, if you have high traffic, memory consumption will be very large and it may not handle a big number of requests.