When trying to set up a Zenphoto gallery on blurringexistence.net I needed to upload a rather large zip archive (1.4GB) containing quite a few 6MP photo’s to Zenphoto. Obviously, PHP wasn’t configured to accept such large POST requests and rejected the request.
So I increased the post_max_size and upload_max_filesize to
something that suited the large file. Uploading the file seemed to work
now. Except that it didn’t do anything with the file I uploaded which I
guessed was because the processing of the zip archive took too long and
was aborted.
After that however, the entire Zenphoto instance refused to work properly. Maybe something broke while processing the file? Since the Zenphoto instance was nearly empty anyway, I tried to reinstall it. Which worked up to the point of entering the MySQL settings and credentials. They just wouldn’t stick and return a very non-descriptive message (something along the lines of ‘query error’, I don’t remember the exact message). PHP still worked, the serendipity instance still seemed to work. No strange errors or warnings any of my log files.
After a bit of debugging, the reason everything broke was that the PHP
variable $_POST was always empty. I figured
that something that fundamental shouldn’t break by itself so it was
probably something I did which led me to removing the post_max_size
and upload_max_filesize options and everything started working again.
There are several warnings in the PHP
documentation about post_max_size: If PHP is
compiled with memory_limit support, memory_limit should be larger
than post_max_size and the one I broke:
PHP allows shortcuts for bit values, including K (kilo), M (mega) and G (giga). PHP will do the conversions automatically if you use any of these. Be careful not to exceed the 32 bit signed integer limit (if you’re using 32bit versions) as it will cause your script to fail.
Another couple of hours wasted because I didn’t RTFM :-/