Limit upload speed per user with PHP or swfupload

Question

I have a web application written in PHP and Yii that lets users upload images and videos using swfupload. There are two types of users: premium and regular.

I want to limit the upload speed for regular users but I cannot find any way that is not global.

Can the upload speed be limited per user from PHP, Yii or swfupload?

Answer 1

There is the stream php://input which…

is not available with enctype="multipart/form-data".

If you don't have that restriction you could register a stream filter and do some token bucket on it, e.g. with bandwidth-throttle/bandwidth-throttle

use bandwidthThrottle\BandwidthThrottle;

$in  = fopen("php://input", "r");
$out = fopen(__DIR__ . "/upload.txt", "w");

$throttle = new BandwidthThrottle();
$throttle->setRate(100, BandwidthThrottle::KIBIBYTES); // Set limit to 100KiB/s
$throttle->throttle($in);

stream_copy_to_stream($in, $out);

Answer 2

Here is a speed limit solution for download. You can use same for upload. .i.e.read the file into smaller chunk and then upload each chunk with sleep :)

Let’s assume we want to limit the bandwidth for images found in /images/ folder.

First, we need a bandwidth php script, in which we setup the limit of the downloading speed. We achieve that by reading small packets from the file requested, with a timeout between readings:

<?php
//Enter the bandwidth here
$bandwidth = '32'; // KB/s
//For security reason, we will add here all the pattern that we allow for the filename
//Change this to your own needs
$allowed_file_patterns = array('/images\/(\w+)\.(jpg|gif|jpeg|png)/i');
 
function getMimeType($file_path)
{
    $mtype = '';
    if (function_exists('mime_content_type')){
        $mtype = mime_content_type($file_path);
    }
    elseif (function_exists('finfo_file')){
        $finfo = finfo_open(FILEINFO_MIME);
        $mtype = finfo_file($finfo, $file_path);
        finfo_close($finfo);
    } elseif (function_exists('getimagesize')){
        $finfo = @getimagesize($file_path);
        //var_dump($finfo);
        $mtype = !empty($finfo['mime'])?$finfo['mime']:'';
    }
    if ($mtype == ''){
             $mtype = "application/force-download";
    }
    return $mtype;
}
$accepted_pattern = false;
foreach ($allowed_file_patterns as $pattern){
    if (preg_match($pattern,$_GET['file'])){
        $accepted_pattern = true;
    }
}
if (!$accepted_pattern){
    //Stop the script if is not a valid access
    header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
    echo 'Forbidden request';
    exit;
 
}
 
$fileName = $_GET['file'];
$fh = @fopen($fileName,'rb');
if (!$fh){
    echo 'Unable to open file';
    exit;
}
$fileSize = filesize($fileName);
header("Content-Type: ".getMimeType($fileName));
header("Content-Length: " . $fileSize);
while(!feof($fh))
{
    //Read the allowed bandwidth, and then just wait a second
    print(fread($fh, $bandwidth*1024));
    usleep(1000000);
}
fclose($fh);
?>

Now, you can create an .htaccess file, to redirect all the requests you need to be limited, to that bandwidth script:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|GIF|JPG|JPEG|PNG)$
RewriteRule (.*) bandwidth.php?file=$1 [L]

If you want you can limit the bandwidth only for some ip’s or some referals. In the htaccess file you will have:

RewriteEngine on

Enter the ip's or class of ip's you want to limit bellow, with [OR] between them

All the other ip's will access the url directly, without going through bandwidth.php

RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^123\.45\.6\.78$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^127\.0\.0 [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|GIF|JPG|JPEG|PNG)$
RewriteRule (.*) bandwidth.php?file=$1 [L]

Enter the ip's or class of ip's you want to limit bellow, with [OR] between them

All the other ip's will access the url directly, without going through bandwidth.php

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?php-code.net/.*$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(www\.)?example.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png|GIF|JPG|JPEG|PNG)$
RewriteRule (.*) bandwidth.php?file=$1 [L]

In this way you can limit the traffic from leecher sites, without forbidden them, which I think is a more elegant solution.