Magic settings for upload large files under IIS and .NET

I remember when I started this blog; I talked about upload large files using .NET and IIS. This time I’ll share with you some interesting points to be aware of when trying to upload large files. I consider large when the size is bigger than 2GB, because this is the actual limit is almost all web servers under Microsoft technology.
Based on my experience with this kind of situations, I can say that the web environment is not ready to transfer that much information. Remember the beginnings of WWW, when everything that roamed through the wires were just text and small graphics, I say more, remember what HTTP stands for (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) and what is HyperText?
However, the file transfer to and from the server is something very common nowadays, therefore, it’s necessary to know how to handle it. For those who doesn’t need to upload files greater than 500 MB, I recommend the solution I presented through the my firsts posts in this blog, even for upload a bit bigger files, but when the size start over the 1 GB it’s better to think about another solution.
The larger sizes you could upload the bigger security risk you have. I explain, solutions like NeatUpload and many others (open source or not) expect to make the upload in a big single request, although there are modules that make the copy block by block in order to be sure of not making big memory peaks, the web server must allow a very large request, exposing it to a DOS attack, just an example. Another possible problem may be if the client doesn’t have a fast connection (like me) there’s a (high) risk that a large file might be interrupted, and then? Start over again. On the server side the risk of execution timed out exists too (I’ve faced that), so the value of this setting must be increased.
If you wish to upload small/medium files there’s no problem using this kind of solution, but if you want go over the size, I suggest another kind of workaround.
Alongside my research for the best solution I’ve found the following links I hope to be useful to you, I let MSDN articles, Stack Overflow questions, among others very interesting sources written by the most involved people in this matter, where one can drink the honeys of knowledge.

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/prashant_upadhyay/archive/2011/07/13/large-file-upload-issue-in-asp-net.aspx
• http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/security/requestFiltering/requestLimits
• http://www.webtrenches.com/post.cfm/iis7-file-upload-size-limits
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6802519/how-to-upload-files-over-2gb-to-iis-7-5-net-4
• http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2008/01/08/large-file-uploads-in-asp-net.aspx
• http://www.mojoportal.com/supporting-large-file-uploads.aspx

As a quick conclusion, I can say the following in order to configure properly your application:
The default value for the request size in ASP.NET 2.0 and later is 4 MB. Under IIS6 the setting is configured by the httpRuntime node, example:

 <configuration> 
  <system.web>
   <httpRuntime maxRequestLength="102400" executionTimeout="3600" />
  </system.web>
 </configuration> 

Important to say here, the value of maxRequestLength is given in KB and the executionTimeout is given in seconds.
Under IIS7+ the setting is configured by the requestLimits node, example:

 <system.webServer>
  <security>
   <requestFiltering>
    <requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="1024000000" />
   </requestFiltering>
  </security>
 </system.webServer>

In this case the value of maxAllowedContentLength is given in bytes. This must combined with the applicationHost.config file usually located at (C:\Windows\System32\inetsrv\Configs) whose section should look like:

 <section name="requestFiltering" overrideModeDefault="Allow" />

As I said before, I hope this compilation saves you time of google-research, in a further post I’ll talk about another solution that I consider that more fits better in web environment.