Re: Opening a Large Text File

Since you invite any suggestions ... how about formatting the file itself and letting the web server handle opening and printing it? You could set up a cron job to add the font tag to the large file instead of trying to do so dynamically each request. Also, since you did not supply an example of what your 5 meg file looks like, are you really sure that whitespace is going to be handled the way you think it is?

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Comment on Re: Opening a Large Text File

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Re^2: Opening a Large Text File by Anonymous Monk on Jul 06, 2006 at 15:27 UTC
This is just a plain text log file with lines like this one `13:53:32,12-27-2004,Joe Bow,Toronto Travel .,ref_333,SSHTEST###12345## +#00000000000000, 9` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Opening a Large Text File by graff (Chancellor) on Jul 06, 2006 at 20:08 UTC
So based on that (typical?) line of log data, let's say it's 90 bytes/line, so a 5 MB file will be close to 56,000 lines of text. Now, what does the person looking at the browser intend to do with this display? Is the user looking for something in particular? Maybe just the oldest log entries, or just the newest ones, or just the ones that have some particular properties? If you figure out what the client needs to do with this information, you should focus on providing the particular subset of the log file that will directly support that task, so that you deliver an appropriate quantity of data, instead of delivering all the data. The appropriate quantity for manual inspection in a browser display will probably be a lot less than 5 MB (hopefully closer to 50 KB); then your task is to write the correct kind of filter that will deliver just that subset of data, and if the filter runs reasonably fast on the server, the slowness problem at the browser end will go probably away. If the client needs a complete download of the log file, then set it up as an ftp transfer to the client's local disk, instead of sending it to the browser display.	[reply]