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[EP-tech] Injecting gigabyte-scale files into EPrints archive - impossible?

Hello developers and users,
again I'm sorry I have to consult you concerning a problem we've run into and couldn't solve ourselves.
We need to attach a big file to a document, i.e. one of 3g in size. We limited web upload to 100m by webserver configuration in order that we keep control of large file uploads. To get bigger file into the archive we successfully use the following command: 

/usr/bin/perl ~eprints/bin/toolbox $repo addFile \
   --document $docid --filename $filename < /path/to/existing/file
(Besides, is there a convenient way of getting the document id? It is rather tedious to upload a placeholder file so we can manually seek and grab a doc id by Firebug extension; after running the command, we open the EPrint file dialog in the document metadata to switch the main file and delete the placeholder.)
I narrowed this method down to a line of code in EPrints::Toolbox::get_data() that I question is scalable for these dimensions (given our hardware memory space): 

    join("", <STDIN>)
builds, in EPrints 3.3.10, a monstrous perl scalar that certainly is perpetually expanded and moved around in memory to fit in. I wonder if there is a way I can move the file to the expected place myself and adjust the file record in the EPrint database. Tried this already but at last I ended up downloading the tiny placeholder file again. I deleted the file in the console (rm), but then EPrints system threw "couldn't read file contents". So, somewhere things still were arranged for the old file. The browser displays, though, the right filename in the modal dialog offering to save or to open the file with a program whatsoever.
The toolbox command was appallingly running more than two hours and gorging swap space like there was no tomorrow, then we killed it. It consumed 2% of CPU in average, status flag was "D" most of the time (man ps: "uninterruptable sleep (usually IO)"). It appeared to me it was constantly swapping.
Today I tried the toolbox addDocument command which doesn't seem to save me work after all, it just requires xml data. But with <url>file:///path/of/file/to/import</url>, it runs out of disk space again while "downloading" that url in /tmp. Wish I could pass a path of a file to be copied directly, isn't that possible somehow? 


Kind regards
Florian


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UB Heidelberg (Altstadt)
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