Testfile Script for webserver ?

TeoM

Hello all,
Does anyone know how liteserver.nl can offer these testfiles : https://testfiles.liteserver.nl/

They offer testfiles in petabytes that must be some script that generates a live testfile when someone wants to donwload something.

What is this traffic waste? If one could rather provide the customer then more traffic.

You offer Exabyte testfiles that waste traffic but offers the customer only 1TB ?

yoursunny

Suppose you want to emit an 1TB file, you can make a 1GB file and then output that file in a loop:

header("Content-Type: application/octet-stream");
header("Content-Length: ".(1024*1024*1024*1024));

for ($i=0; $i<1024*1024; $i) {
  readfile("1GB.bin");
}

Of course doing this in FastCGI would be very slow.

You can write an HTTP server in Go to generate such HTTP responses more efficiently.

rhinoduck

While I understand what the purpose of these is (alright, I am not so sure about the exibyte ones ), I myself was wondering how comfortable those who host them are with the potential volume of traffic.

Is it simply the scale/size of the operation/company which allows this to be a no factor? Or are there possibly agreements in place to keep the costs sensible? Same thoughts actually popped up in my head when looking at the list of endpoints against which YABS tests run...

rcxb

I'm sure one fresh Linux ISO consumes more traffic than a few massive test files that only rarely does anyone access.

Peering agreements are odd... You're supposed to keep traffic in.out balanced. If you've got customers doing much more downloading than uploading, upload bandwidth is not just free, but may be a dangerous imbalance. That's how ISPs were able to make the case that Netflix should pay them millions. If Netflix had utterly wasted a ton of their downstream on trash, they'd have been in the clear.

In the core, there is obscene throughput available at nearly zero cost. It's only on the edge that transit gets costly for the rest of us.

psb777

@TeoM said: They offer testfiles in petabytes that must be some script that generates a live testfile when someone wants to donwload something.

Not necessarily. You can generate a huge sparse file that consumes no disk space:

# truncate --size 1E testfile

# ls -l testfile
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1152921504606846976 Apr 24 07:50 testfile

# du testfile
0       testfile

And that file can be served with any web servers, just like regular files:

# curl http://127.0.0.1/testfile -o /dev/null
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
  0 1024P    0 5648M    0     0   797M      0   15964d  0:00:07   15964d  941M^C