[wp-hackers] file upload: why actual files?

[m at tidakada.com]

Quoting Michael Leuchtenburg <michael at slashhome.org>:

> > Then there's the issue of MySQL being able to support BLOBs & large
> > files or not, I'm not sure about that, but thats a minor issue compared
> > to the one outlined above. You may have a super fast DSL Connection, but
> > I & quite a lot of others are still on poor 64Kbps connections. ;)
>
> It does support them just fine. A LONGBLOB can hold up to 4GB. A
> MEDIUMBLOB can hold up to 16MB. I'd say LONGBLOB, because someone might
> want to post videos, or long audio segments.


Storing binary files in the database just does not scale. Half a hundred
concurrent WP installs on the same server (very common with our userbase) would
be enough to make sysadmins curse and ban WP from it, as the memory consumption
would skyrocket.
OK it makes it easy to backup the whole shebang, but that isn't enough to make
such a sacrifice out of resources.

There are things we can do to handle files better though, such as keeping
references to them in the db. But not the files themselves, as it's been proven
countless times to be a bad idea.

--
Michel Valdrighi
http://zengun.org/weblog/