Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). This feed URL has been discontinued. Please update your reader's URL to : http://feeds.feedburner.com/winsmarts Read full article .... ...

Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

---

Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information).

---

Okay this is a big BIG B-I-G problem. And with SP2010 it’s going to be more prominent, because atleast at the server side, SharePoint can support large files much much better than SharePoint 2007 ever did.

The issue with very large files being uploaded through any browser based API are -

1. Reliably transferring gigabyte or bigger files without breakages over a protocol like HTTP, which is better suited for tiny transfers like images and text.
2. Not killing your browser because it has to load all that in memory
3. Not killing your web server because
   1. All that you upload through HTTP post, first gets streamed into IIS Memory, w3wp.exe memory before the ENTIRE FILE finishes uploading .. before it is stored. Which means,
      1. You cannot show an accurate and live progress bar of the upload, IIS gives you no such accurate metric of an upload. All the counters it gives you are approximate.
      2. Your w3wp.exe eats up all server memory – 4GB of it, for a 4GB upload.
      3. A thread is kept busy for the entire duration of the upload, thereby greatly limiting your web server’s capability to serve newer requests.
      4. Kills effective load balancing.
4. Not killing your content database because,
   1. As you are uploading a very large file, that large file gets written sequentially into the DB, and therefore for a very large file very severely impacts the database performance.

I had put together another video showing RBS usage in SharePoint 2010. I talked about many practical ramifications of using RBS in SharePoint in that video. Note that enabling large file support will never ever be a point and click job, simply because there are too many questions one needs to ask, and too many things one needs to plan for.

However, one part that will remain common across all large file upload scenarios, in SharePoint or outside of SharePoint is to do it efficiently while not killing the web server.

In this video, I describe using the Telerik Silverlight Upload control with SharePoint 2010 to enable efficient large file uploads in SharePoint. Presenting ..

The video

Comment on the article ....