By pushkarpathak on

On our website we post complete books in PDF format for open access to public. Many times books with maps and graphs have size of 8 MB.

We are attaching the PDF file to the page and give link to it from the content. On clicking the link, the book opens on browser.

Our hosting provides had informed that the "open" option consumes more RAM of our Server and affects Server performance.

It is being found that many other websites and blogs had also given link to our book, the pdf file. We do not have any problem in terms of use, but it adds load to our Server.

Right now we have approximately 150 e-book on website.

What is the best practice to post large PDFs on website?

Thanks
Pushkar Pathak

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

Pedja Grujić’s picture

Pedja Grujić commented

Best way to improve the serving of PDF's and take the load off server is to setup a amazon or similar CDN. ( http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/ and http://www.metaltoad.com/blog/amazon-cloudfront-drupal )

If you setup CDN then all the files are served from there instead of your site. In any case 150 files @ 8MB should not cause an issue on server, you can also look at upgrading your hosting package.

Pedja
Drupal Geek at New Target Inc.
http://www.newtarget.com

pushkarpathak’s picture

pushkarpathak commented

Thanks Pedja for your reply.

Do you think forcing the visitor to "Download" the pdf is a better option?

What could be the ideal hosting specification for such a website? We have approximately 20,000 nodes, 150 e-books and other 300 small pdfs.

Is there any friendly way we block other websites/blogs to link to PDFs and give link to our page?

Thanks
Pushkar

numerabilis’s picture

numerabilis commented

Hi, I would like to know which module are you using to view large PDF files with Drupal because when I do this the page gets blinking and don´t load completely.