Immediate download

[TtuxX]

Description

The Readme states that:

The download will happen in a background job, which should start within five minutes if your server is set up correctly. If you want transfers to start sooner, you will need to configure your server so that cron.php is triggered more often.

I am then wondering what are the initial reasons why the download is run through a Cron task (which will de facto delay the download and might kill it earlier than expected), rather than having the Transfer app create a proper download job immediately? :)

Use case

Avoid a download delay

[danth]

If a large transfer was ran inline during the API request, it could cause the request to time out, therefore interrupting the download. Cron jobs should be allowed to run for a much longer time before they are killed.

If every download was started immediately, we could end up with too many running at once, if lots of users requested transfers at the same time. I would like to keep some form of queue for this reason. However, there is no reason to wait 5 minutes for the next cron job to be triggered before starting to process the queue, if nothing is running already.

NCDownloader works around the waiting time by using Aria2 as a download manager, however I would prefer to keep the Transfer app simple to install, by not requiring any additional software on the server. This seems like something which could be improved in the main code of Nextcloud instead. It would be good to get all queued jobs started as soon as possible, both from this app and from others. Perhaps a background daemon which is always running, and waits for another job when it has nothing to do.

[TtuxX]

I agree but I'm afraid that such a change at the core of NextCloud would take a long time :(
I'm trying to think about two other possibilities :

Case of a forced triggering of cron.php:

Wouldn't it be possible for the Transfer application to immediately (I'm not sure how) trigger the execution of a cron job by executing immediately by itself the php -f /var/www/nextcloud/cron.php system command?
That would reduce a lot the initial cron execution random delay.

Or:

Case of immediate download with a simple request:

Wouldn't it be possible otherwise to, in the admin settings:

• Have an option to activate an immediate "dumb" download as soon as a link is submitted
• Have also an option to set the maximum number of simultaneous direct "dumb" downloads allowed per user during an immediate download (for example maximum 2)?

[z0rgster]

Would it be possible to set a "small file size limit"? Then the job could start immediately and if the file download is completed within that limit, everything is fine. If not, the job is paused/terminated and continued/restarted by the cron job.

This would be really useful for pulling files like pdfs (device manuals etc.) into the nextcloud without waiting.

[danth]

I had previously tried to implement this, but unfortunately a lot of websites don't allow us to determine the file size (via a HTTP HEAD request) without starting the download. For that reason many small files would end up having to be queued anyway.

I suppose we could begin the download every time and interrupt it when the file size is known to be above the limit.