Attachment Size

**Thorburn** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Should the permissible attachment size be increased?

(Currently: 1 MB for all file types.)

**bocian** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Should be increased, it would be nice to share bigger files.

**Johannes de León** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

yes, that would be good, i remember one time when i wanted to upload a file with ~1200 kb and i couldn't, so, i voted on 5-10 mb because it is good to share some .mp3 files with interesting stuff!

**Milesian** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Yeah, that would definately be a bonus!

800mb might be a bit excessive, but upto 5-10mb to let us upload music and stuff would be most welcome.

**bocian** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Originally Posted by Milesian

Yeah, that would definately be a bonus!

800mb might be a bit excessive, but upto 5-10mb to let us upload music and stuff would be most welcome.

I had 800mb in mind.

**Johannes de León** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

oops, i have noticed now that i accidently voted for the first option...

well, but i wanted to vote on the second one!

**Frans_Jozef** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

2-5MB is more than sufficient; I have some large PDF document stored somewhere in this laptop of mine, but I cant remember in which file I dumped them in all hats and now it's like searching a needle in a haystack...not that many make an effort to open these documents or read through to the last sentence...

**Zyklop** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

5-10MB would come in handy, but only if it doesn´t slow down the server.

**Thorburn** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Originally Posted by Zyklop

5-10MB would come in handy, but only if it doesn´t slow down the server.

It doesn't. HTTP accesses (file transfers) put hardly any strain on the server (fractions of a promille of CPU time). MySQL (database) requests are what produces most of the load.

Attachments are not stored in the database but in the file system; only their reference is in the database. Thus, it doesn't matter of what size they are. It takes the same mySQL effort to find them regardless of size. Once they are found, Apache takes over.

If you go to http://www.skadi.net/ (which is just HTML via HTTP without any SSI, CGI, PHP, not to mention mySQL) you will see that it always comes up extremely fast. Forum page requests (and in particular the Forum Home which has to run ample of table scans and queries through a hundreds of megs database) take longer.

**rusalka** · Saturday, May 15th, 2004

Voted for 5 to 10 MB as I think sharing mp3s would be interesting and some PDF files can come in enormous sizes if they're e-books. I first checked out it if it was going to slow down the server and since it's not going to, wouldn't hurt right?