[Zope-CMF] best practices - dealing with large files and avoiding data corruption

Dieter Maurer dieter@handshake.de
Sun, 20 Jul 2003 20:44:57 +0200


Sam Brauer wrote at 2003-7-18 16:25 -0400:
 > ...
 > Yesterday one of our Zope sites "locked up" the server (had to be rebooted).
 > I think a contributing factor may have been that someone was uploading 
 > some largish files into the site.  Unfortunately, there's no telling 
 > error message in the log.

Please see my recent post to Paul Winkler in "zodb-dev@zope.org"
Subject "Metadata in zope / binary data on FS".

  Something strange happens with large file upload.
  Almost surely, it is not Zope (in the narrow sense).
  It may be ZServer...

I will probably investigate the problem in the next week.

 > I've seen the CMFExtFile product, but it doesn't look to be supported 
 > anymore and the project page for it says that it doesn't work with Zope 
 > 2.5 and higher.

Search the mailing list archive.
I saw recent posts of people using CMFExtFile with modern Zope 
versions.

But, when I am right (ZServer is to blame), it will not help as uploads
still go through ZServer.

 > ...
 > After only a couple of weeks with CMF sites in production, I've already 
 > seen 2 corrupt data errors.  Not to imply that CMF was responsible for 
 > the errors, it's just that the only Zope sites I have are CMF sites.

Can you please be more specific.

What "corrupt data errors" have you seen?

We know several "pack" problems with Zope 2.6.1 (see the collector).
That's a main reason why there will soon be Zope 2.6.2.

But: we use Zope+CMF for more than a 1 1/2 year and saw a single
occurrence of this problem.

 > ...
 > I love Zope, but need it to be reliable.

Please provide concise and complete problem reports.

As soon as we see a serious problem pattern someone in the community
starts analysing and chances are high that the next release
will have fixed the problem.


Dieter