What is the maximum file size I can transfer using HTTP? And using FTP?

Question

Added: I am conducting a study for a new system we\'re going to develop in my work. It consists in authenticating users, displaying what files they want to

Answer 1

There are no such limitation by-design in protocols you said. Only timeouts on concrete servers

Answer 2

And one important question - are you going to upload or download?

I could say that downloading has significantly less limitations that uploading. I don't know why. Maybe because main purpose of HTTP and FTP is sending data, not receiving.

That's why HTTP/FTP servers could break upload session more frequently rather then downloading session.

Answer 3

The upload in HTTP is usualy limited as the server has to wait until the (mostly slow) upload is finished to respond to the request.

Answer 4

There is no maximum. Any max you are encountering is application specific or site specific.

I've downloaded DVD isos from Microsoft using HTTP and FTP without issue (~4gb).

I've also uploaded huge files via both methods.

Can you elaborate on what you're trying to do?

Answer 5

As already answered, the protocol has no limitations, but most HTTP servers have default upload limits out-of-the-box:

IIS6 uses MaxRequestEntityAllowed (default is 4GB) and AspMaxRequestEntityAllowed (default is 200000 bytes) in metabase.xml.

IIS7 uses maxRequestEntityAllowed: **appcmd set config /section:asp /maxRequestEntityAllowed:***int* (default is 200000 bytes)

Apache uses LimitRequestBody (default is 2GB)

Answer 6

Since the size of a transfer is probably stated near the beginning, I'd bet the limit of your file size is the same as the limit for an unsigned integer. Judging by the time period when HTTP and FTP became popular and useful, I'd say that's a 32-bit unsigned integer, so 2^32 Bytes, or 4.0 GiB.