I'm working on a machine with limited memory, and I'd like to upload a dynamically generated (not-from-disk) file in a streaming manner to S3. In other words, I don't know the file size when I start the upload, but I'll know it by the end. Normally a PUT request has a Content-Length header, but perhaps there is a way around this, such as using multipart or chunked content-type.
S3 can support streaming uploads. For example, see here:
http://blog.odonnell.nu/posts/streaming-uploads-s3-python-and-poster/
My question is, can I accomplish the same thing without having to specify the file length at the start of the upload?
You have to upload your file in 5MiB+ chunks via S3's multipart API. Each of those chunks requires a Content-Length but you can avoid loading huge amounts of data (100MiB+) into memory.
- Initiate S3 Multipart Upload.
- Gather data into a buffer until that buffer reaches S3's lower chunk-size limit (5MiB). Generate MD5 checksum while building up the buffer.
- Upload that buffer as a Part, store the ETag (read the docs on that one).
- Once you reach EOF of your data, upload the last chunk (which can be smaller than 5MiB).
- Finalize the Multipart Upload.
S3 allows up to 10,000 parts. So by choosing a part-size of 5MiB you will be able to upload dynamic files of up to 50GiB. Should be enough for most use-cases.
However: If you need more, you have to increase your part-size. Either by using a higher part-size (10MiB for example) or by increasing it during the upload.
First 25 parts: 5MiB (total: 125MiB)
Next 25 parts: 10MiB (total: 375MiB)
Next 25 parts: 25MiB (total: 1GiB)
Next 25 parts: 50MiB (total: 2.25GiB)
After that: 100MiB
This will allow you to upload files of up to 1TB (S3's limit for a single file is 5TB right now) without wasting memory unnecessarily.
A note on your link to Sean O'Donnells blog:
His problem is different from yours - he knows and uses the Content-Length before the upload. He wants to improve on this situation: Many libraries handle uploads by loading all data from a file into memory. In pseudo-code that would be something like this:
data = File.read(file_name)
request = new S3::PutFileRequest()
request.setHeader('Content-Length', data.size)
request.setBody(data)
request.send()
His solution does it by getting the Content-Length
via the filesystem-API. He then streams the data from disk into the request-stream. In pseudo-code:
upload = new S3::PutFileRequestStream()
upload.writeHeader('Content-Length', File.getSize(file_name))
upload.flushHeader()
input = File.open(file_name, File::READONLY_FLAG)
while (data = input.read())
input.write(data)
end
upload.flush()
upload.close()
Putting this answer here for others in case it helps:
If you don't know the length of the data you are streaming up to S3, you can use S3FileInfo
and its OpenWrite()
method to write arbitrary data into S3.
var fileInfo = new S3FileInfo(amazonS3Client, "MyBucket", "streamed-file.txt");
using (var outputStream = fileInfo.OpenWrite())
{
using (var streamWriter = new StreamWriter(outputStream))
{
streamWriter.WriteLine("Hello world");
// You can do as many writes as you want here
}
}
You can use the gof3r command-line tool to just stream linux pipes:
$ tar -czf - <my_dir/> | gof3r put --bucket <s3_bucket> --key <s3_object>
Refer more on HTTP multi-part enitity requests. You can send a file as chunks of data to the target.
If you are using Node.js you can use a plugin like s3-streaming-upload to accomplish this quite easily.