[Zope] Zope refusing to serve our large files (180M+)

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 05:58:34PM +0200, Chris Wilton wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Sure someone's probably come across something similar, but I couldn't
> find anything in the archives: our zope is refusing to allow download
> of files greater than around 170M through the http server. We have a
> number of db dumpfiles we want people to be able to access. We are
> running Zope 2.7.0 with an Apache front (reverse-proxy, as our zope is
> on a non-standard port) on a linux2.4 kernel (mosix) with bags of
> memory; the apache end is fine - the zope installation is local and I
> am using the port number with all the same problems.
> 
> 1) I can download a 170M file but not a 180M file through the http
> server. With the larger file request we get a 500 error in the trace
> log. The download box pops up but nothing is actually downloaded.

If there's a 500 error in the trace or access log, there should
be something in your error_log too.  Traceback please?
 
> 2) I can reach both through the ftp server but transfer rate is
> ridiculous (1.7Kb/sec) for a University lan.

Very poor speed with blobs is a known problem with zope's built-in FTP
server.  Almost nobody ever spends any time improving zope's FTP
support, since so many of us never use it :-\

2.7.0 is getting quite old, so you might do well to look at the
changelog for more recent versions of zope and see if there's
any FTP-related improvements in there. I haven't been paying
attention to that.
 
> 3) Even if I could find out why ftp transfer is so slow and sort it, I
> seem unable to grant a non-manager read access to a LocalFS object:
> the properties don't stick when I change them, 

LocalFS doesn't support properties at all AFAIK.

> and Zope creates the
> link to the local directory with user Zope, group Zope, permissions
> 660, hence although managers can reach the files, nothing is reachable
> for an 'anonymous' user (I created a special user for ftp and gave
> only access to the specific directories, before you voice concerns!)

You're talking about Zope permissions and filesystem permissions
in the same sentence, and the two have *nothing* to do with 
each other, so I can't quite parse the above.
 
-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com