web2py site doesn't load all images/videos (especially larger ones)

Question

First of all, I must say I have seen something similar to this in the web2py discussion group, but I couldn't understand it very well.

---

I've set up a database-driven website using web2py in which the entries are just HTML text. Most of them will contain img and/or video tags that point to relative URLs; these files are stored in folders with the address pattern static/content/article/<article-name> and the document's base href is set via the controller to make these links work. So, the images are stored and referenced directly, without all the upload/download machinery.
I'm testing it locally and using Rocket server because I'm not allowed to install Apache in this PC.

The problem:
Everything works fine, except, as it seems, when there are several "large" files being requested. By "large" I mean 4Mb files were enough, which isn't really a lot (and I think slightly smaller files would produce the same result). I'm pretty sure the links aren't broken since 1) by copying/pasting their URLs in the browser they show up normally, 2) the images/videos appear well/broken randomly when I refresh the page and 3) sometimes a video loads until a certain point and then stops, and the browser inspector shows a 'fail' signal. When I replaced these files with smaller ones (each with a dozen kb), all of them loaded. Another thing to consider is that sometimes it takes a really long time until the page finishes loading (from 2 seconds to several minutes).

The questions:

• Is this the simplest/optimal way of getting the job done? I'm aware that web2py has some neat features like upload fields, but I don't know how I could make these files be effortlessly referenced in the document, considering there will be some special features in such pages involving the static files. So the solution I've come up with so far was to create a directory which name equals to the entry's and store the files there, as I said before. Is it an overkill considering what web2py has to offer?

• If the answer to the first question is something like "yes", then (obvious question) what may be causing the problem and how do I fix it? Does it have something to do with the fact that web2py sends static files in chunks of 1Mb? Might it be the Rocket server? Or because I'm testing it locally?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

It's hard to give you an answer without knowing some details...

Where is hosted your Web2py application? Do you use apache? nginx? Did you deploy using a one step-deploy script? (http://web2py.googlecode.com/hg/scripts/setup-web2py-ubuntu.sh)

But in any case, you can (should) :

• Configure Apache/Nginx to serve your static files directly (files in /YourApp/static/.). See "setup-web2py-" scripts in the "scripts" folder for more informations
• Use scripts/zip_static_files.py to create gzipped versions of your static files. You can create a cron to run "python web2py.py -S myapp -R scripts/zip_static_files.py" More details about efficiency in the book : http://web2py.com/books/default/chapter/29/13/deployment-recipes?search=static+files#Efficiency-and-scalability