ccheetham / gmail.com wrote:
> On Jan 1, 1:56 pm, Tim Hunter <TimHun... / nc.rr.com> wrote:
>> thefed wrote:
>>
>>> On Dec 31, 2007, at 7:20 PM, Tim Hunter wrote:
>>>> thefed wrote:
>>>>> But doesn't open-uri download the whole thing to your compy? I was
>>>>> about to use it, but then I ran it in irb and saw it returned a file
>>>>> object.
>>>> Isn't that what you want to happen? I thought your question was about
>>>> how to download it in small chunks so it's not all in memory at the
>>>> same time. This code downloads the whole file, but 8kb at a time.
>>> No, I thought when you use Kernel#open with open-uri, it FIRST downloads
>>> the entire 1GB file to your temp folder, and THEN runs your block on
>>> that file in temp
>> Interesting. I just tried downloading a 6.1MB file with open-uri and
>> didn't see that behavior. I'm using Ruby 1.8.6 on OS X 10.5.
> 
> Hmmm ... fetching a ~5MB file over HTTP, the entire file was
> downloaded prior to the 8192 chunk reads.  Ruby 1.8.6 p111 on Solaris
> 2.11.  Same behavior with JRuby.  FWIW, I'm observing interface stats
> to make my determination.
> 

Fascinating. Learning every day...

*Where* did it download the file to? Did it write it to disk or just 
keep it all in memory?

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