Overcome ASP.NET
Default File Size Limits

While ASP.NET may simplify many aspects of Web development, it was designed to handle only moderate loads due to a little-known built-in file upload limitation. ASP.NET’s shortcomings become evident as soon as production-level stresses are applied to Web applications that require high loads.

Did You Know?

ASP.NET's file upload classes cache the entire HTTP request in memory, so uploading a 60 MB file will utilize well over 60 MB of RAM. Several concurrent uploads of this size can cripple, if not crash, a Web server. Testing has shown that a 200 MB file can crash a Windows 2000 system with 512 MB of RAM.

FileUp includes several performance enhancing technologies that allow IIS and ASP.NET to handle file uploads with minimal memory requirements. With FileUp on your Web server, a 200 MB file upload will use the same server resources as a typical HTML form POST. FileUpEE conserves server resources by intercepting requests with its custom interceptors and using the hard disk to cache the request before it can be put into memory by ASP.NET.

Performance Testing

Using a Windows Performance Monitor it's easy to show how FileUp Enterprise Edition (FileUpEE) greatly improves resource management. During an ASP.NET 300MB file upload you see a very sharp spike in the amount of memory used by the ASP.NET worker process before it ultimately craches. Notice that very little memory is used on the server during the same upload with FileUpEE.

ASP.NET upload fails at just 300MB

FileUp Enterprise continues until the last byte has been received

IIS File Size Limitations

When dealing with even more extreme file transfer requirements, you'll also discover that IIS has a hard request size limit of 4 GB. Any request greater than this will fail immediately with a "Bad Request" error.

The same intercepting technique is used in the case of IIS's 4 GB request size limitation. Very large requests are rejected by IIS because the HTTP 'Content-length' header exceeds a hard-coded maximum value. FileUp's interceptor technology reduces the HTTP 'Content-length' to a small fraction of its original value.