Hello,
Thanks for reaching out to us.
Our plugin uses PHP to manage the download. So if the file size is large, the process will run longer and if there is a restriction to the time limit a PHP process can run or the maximum memory allocated to your PHP process is low, the download can fail. Hosting the files on other platforms would be a good idea. Please note that hosting files on Google drive can still allow users to take the link and distribute it directly. If you want to keep your files secure but host it outside your server I would suggest using Amazon S3 and our S3 add-on/plugin.
I hope that answers your query. Let us know if you have any further questions.
Thanks for the reply. On the server I’m dealing with, PHP execution time is 1,800 seconds, and the PHP memory limit is 768 MB. Those don’t seem like low numbers to me. I’m trying to ensure we’re not going to continue to have download failures – and that’s why I’m looking for more info about the Google Drive add-on.
If the download is managed with PHP, which executes on the server, then why would moving the files to an external host have any effect on the download of large files one way or another?
Also, your documentation for the Google Drive add-on says the Google Drive location will be hidden, so I’m not sure if/what the difference would be if we went to S3. Is that documentation incorrect? Or is the S3 plugin somehow vastly different than the plugin for Google Drive? It seems to me the whole point of the plugin is keeping the drive location hidden — otherwise, I could simply stick a direct link on the site to the Google Drive file(s).
Hello,
That is a decent amount of memory and time allocation. The only way to know what is happening would be to check your server logs for PHP and Apache.
Regarding hosting elsewhere, if the file is hosted elsewhere, our PHP process does not handle the entire download. It just initiates/redirects the download without showing the user the file path.
For Google Drive’s extension, due to lack of proper API, we simply start the download. And when you create a link from your Google Drive account, the permission you need to set is “access to anyone with a link”. As you can guess this is not very secure. After the first download, the user will be able to see the file path in your download history and then share the URL with others.
With Amazon S3, we use their API to create a dynamic link that allows download only for 15 minutes. After the link expires, even though the user can share the link, no one will be able to access it after 15 minutes unless they download using the dynamic link created by our plugin.
Thank you, that’s the information I needed. I’ll see if the client is willing to move to S3 storage, or if the need for a secure link is or isn’t important to them. I appreciate your responsiveness!
