send_file not working as expected

rubyonrails-talk
1

When I try to download a very large file (700MB) using send_file I get a NoMemoryError (failed to allocate memory) error. It does look like I am really running out of memory, because I am watching the memory grow when this piece of code excutes. What typically happens on the client side is that it sends only 256MB of the file to be downloaded. I am stumped and not sure if this is a Windows, Mongrel, Rails, or ruby issue. I thought send_file was supposed to stream a file in small packets so file size wasn't an issue, but this doesn't seem to be the case.

My set up is a Rails App. running on Windows Server 2003, Apache 2.2.3 w/ two Mongrel 0.3.13.3 services running.

Here is the controller code that is erring:

@document = Document.find(params[:id]) send_file(FILE_UPLOAD_ROOT + @document.url.strip)

Additionally, I have tried this:

@document = Document.find(params[:id]) fn = FILE_UPLOAD_ROOT + @document.url.strip file_name = File.basename(fn.gsub('\\', '/')).gsub(/[^\w\.\-]/,'_') send_file(FILE_UPLOAD_ROOT + @document.url.strip, :streaming => true, :type => 'application/octet-stream', :disposition => 'attachment', :filename => file_name)

Any help would be appreciated!

2

Mongrel buffers the Rails response to a StringIO then sends to the client when the request is finished. I recommend using the X-Sendfile: /path/to/file header with Apache2 mod_xsendfile instead of streaming from Rails.

jeremy