Recently Thomas and me met in person and thought about an alternative approach to bring our big file chunking to the next level. “Big file chunking” is ownClouds algorithm to upload huge files to ownCloud with clients.
This is the first of three little blog posts in which we want to present the idea and get your feedback. This is for open discussion, nothing is set in stone so far.
What is the downside of the current approach? Well, the current algorithm needs a lot of distributed knowledge between server and client to work: The naming scheme of the part files, semi secret headers, implicit knowledge. In addition to that, due to the character of the algorithm the server code is too much spread over the whole code base which makes maintaining difficult.
This situation could be improved with the following approach.
To handle chunked uploads, there will be a new WebDAV route, called remote.php/uploads. All uploads of files larger than the chunk size will go through this route.
In a nutshell, an upload of a big file will happen as parts to a directory under that new route. The client creates it through the new route. This initiates a new upload. If the directory could be created successfully, the client starts to upload chunks of the original file into that directory. The sequence of the chunks is set by the names of the chunk files created in the directory. Once all chunks are uploaded, the client submits a MOVE request the renames the chunk upload directory to the target file.
Here is a pseudo code description of the sequence:
1. Client creates an upload directory with a self choosen name (ideally a numeric upload id):
MKCOL remote.php/uploads/upload-id
2. Client sends a chunk:
PUT remote.php/uploads/upload-id/chunk-id
3. Client repeats 2. until all chunks have successfully been uploaded 4. Client finalizes the upload:
MOVE remote.php/uploads/upload-id /path/to/target-file
5. The MOVE sends the ETag that is supposed to be overwritten in the request header to server. Server returns new ETag and FileID as reply headers of the MOVE.
During the upload, client can retrieve the current state of the upload by a PROPFIND request on the upload directory. The result will be a listing of all chunks that are already available on the server with metadata such as mtime, checksum and size.
If the server decides to remove an upload, ie. because it hasn’t been active for a time, it is free to remove the entire upload directory and return status 404 if a client tries to upload to. Also, a client is allowed to remove the entire upload directory to cancel an upload.
An upload is finalized by the MOVE request. Note that it’s a MOVE of a directory on a single file. This operation is not supported in normal file systems, but we think in this case, it has a nice well descriptive meaning. A MOVE is known as an atomic and fast operation, and that way it should be implemented by the server.
Also note that only with the final MOVE the upload operation is associated with the final destination file. We think that this approach already is a great improvement, because there is always a clear state of the upload with no secret knowledge hidden in the process.
In the next blog I will discuss an extension to this that adds more features to the process.
What do you think so far? Your feedback is appreciated, best on the ownCloud devel mailinglist!