Video upload: unreasonable amount of space in /tmp

[collectiveaccess]

Video upload: unreasonable amount of space in /tmp

[stefankeidel]

Well first of all you have to upload the whole file to the web server so the space consumption in the temporary directory will be at least the filesize of whatever file you're uploading via browser because the web server has to store the file somewhere.

If you're planning on uploading 100GB videos you won't be able to do that via browser anyway because most web servers have hard limits built in that are several orders of magnitude smaller. Also, you just don't want to upload 100GB via web browser, period. For that kind of job you should use the batch media importer (Import > Media in the main menu bar) or a custom importer.

As for the giant temp file: At the time of the upload CollectiveAccess has no idea what kind of file it's about to deal with. So it tries all media processing plugins one by one and asks them if they can handle this kind of file. These plugins usually rely on some kind of external tool - like ImageMagick, GraphicsMagick, ffmpeg, whatever - which is why they try to open the file with that tool. Some of these tools have a tendency to crash or do weird things if you throw particular files at them. This identification process happens way before the actual processing so the queue setting doesn't come into play yet.

What kind of *Magick are you using? You can look that up under Manage > Administration > Configuration Check. One of these *Magick entries in the table should have "available" next to it.

And one last thing: For your own sanity you shouldn't change anything in global.conf . You can enable the media queue in setup.php.

[pjotrek-b]

Using "php5-imagick", as suggested in the installation docs.
about editing "global.php": The installation docs say to edit that file.

I'm aware that I won't want (ever!) want to upload files larger than a few MB by browser. Yet, I found it very ineffective that a 3 minute MPEG is blown up to 12 GB by Imagick, just for doing basically nothing... ;)

[collectiveaccess]

ImageMagick does some stupid things when opening certain types of video files, such as creating huge tmp files. There's not much we can do about it other than to modify the ImageMagick delegates.xml file so it doesn't try to process video. If you remove all references to ffmpeg in that file you should find things work more smoothly.

[stefankeidel]

Try using GraphicsMagick instead. In the past the imagick extension, especially the one packaged in Debian, caused a ton of problems in my setups and GM is faster anyway. Get rid of the php5-imagick package, restart your webserver to make sure the extension is not loaded anymore, and then install the package "graphicsmagick" and make sure the path in app/conf/external_applications.conf is correct (which it should be by default).

[collectiveaccess]

GraphicsMagick has a delegates.xml file as well, as it's derived from ImageMagick. So the same "trick" of removing ffmpeg references is useful here as well.

[pjotrek-b]

Thanks for the tips!
I'll give it a try.

[pjotrek-b]

Since you closed it:
Is this fixed, or does it still require the workaround?

[stefankeidel]

There's nothing to fix for us here, as explained above.