How about fpassthru? Does it eat up all the memory?

Why don’t split this operation into two different? The first one creates file, the second – does the import?

Hi Anonymous, and Hongli – these are all great suggestions!

I’ve never dealt with large file downloads like this where I’m serving the file up for download, so I’m a bit new to this arena.

The suggestions are much appreciated and I’ll try them both out!

I did something like this before but I didn’t use passthru. I just read the file in small chunks of 8 KB and writes out each chunk as I read them. Output buffering has to be disabled of course.

Why write to a file at all? Why not passthru the output of ‘mysqldump | bzip2′ directly? That way the user doesn’t have to wait for the dump to complete.

I know PHP-heads are fond of reinventing the wheel, but you may want to look into the X-Sendfile header.

http://www.adaniels.nl/articles/how-i-php-x-sendfile/