Re: how to check for bandwidth limitations when uploading files?

Jim Lucas wrote:

Robert P. J. Day wrote:

probably not really a PHP question but i'll take a chance, anyway. i want to examine the network throughput i can get when continually uploading files from a PHP script via a POST request using the HTTP_Request2 class. i have a client-side script that simply takes files, creates a short POST request, and submits it to a server-side PHP script that takes the uploaded file and saves it. no big deal. as a test, i created a random 5M file, then looped 100 times submitting the same file, and timed it. while the system and user time was only a few seconds total, real (clock on the wall) time was 2.5 minutes. this suggests that the bottleneck is simply network transfer speed. while i'm doing these uploads, is there a way to monitor network throughput? if this is truly the bottleneck, the only real solution will be to pay a premium for faster network access, i suppose. but i'd just like to be able to produce some numbers or evidence that that's the actual problem. thoughts? rday

What web server are you using? Is it Apache, lighttpd, php daemon, etc? If it is anything but directly talking to a php daemon, you must take into consideration that the parent web server does not hand off processing to PHP until it has received the entire file. At this point is when your timer script starts working. So, what is receiving the file?

I'd call the script via ab [1] from localhost, the computer you're testing and then another server with a good connection - that way you'll get solid numbers and be able to pinpoint the bottleneck in a snap. [1] http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html Best, Nathan