Comments on: Overcoming the 2GB file limit in Linux when moving your sites.

By: Ze

Ze — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:17:39 +0000

Hi Greg, I always linked this limitation to the size of an signed 32 bit int. I’m not sure why in the era of cheap terabyte disks we’re still discussing this.

By the way, you can probably gzip or bzip2 the file before split’ing it, will save you tons of bandwidth and transfer time between servers.

Regards,
Zé

By: Matt Metzger

Matt Metzger — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:02:29 +0000

I’ll back Greg up on that. My Linux host also has the limitation of not being able to display or access anything larger than 2GB through the web, though the file itself can reside on the host without a problem. Perhaps it is a problem of Apache then?

By: Greg-J

Greg-J — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:08:43 +0000

I’m not entirely sure James. I know enough to get around and perform the tasks I need to in Linux and that’s about it. I do know it’s not just me though, it seems like it’s still a very common problem from the searching I did.

Thank you for your input and information though.

By: James Harrison

James Harrison — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 01:20:26 +0000

What filesystem are you using? ext3 has a support of at least 16GiB files without any magic tricks, and up to 2TiB with an 8kb block size. I’d assume you’re using HFS or FAT16 (the only two filesystems I know of with a 2GB file limit). It’s nothing to do with the 32-bit interface (Minix, back in the 8086 days, supported up to 1GiB- back when 2MB of RAM was hot, and 8-bit computing was considered lavish- don’t get confused by Microsoft’s poor programming on the link between 32/64-bits and memory/file size limits)