SermonSpeaker creating lots of huge zip files

I discovered that SermonSpeaker appears to be creating lots of duplicates or partials of zip files of sermon series, these zip files are each over 0.5 GB!! see attached image as an example (from the scrollbar on the right you can tell that it just keeps going!!)

Yeah, this is a bug I know of. I tried to fix it with the latest release so I would be interested if it still happens.

I think those temporary files were created when a user tried to download a series, but canceled the session before the download started. This could happen for big series where it takes long to create the series.zip and the user was to bored to wait.
I've changed it in the latest release so it shouldn't stop the process if the user stops the browser. It still could time out the script or run out of memory, but this should generate a fatal error in the server log and is nothing I could change.

The main reason however is that the series zipfiles are created on demand when a user tries to download a series. That means the user has to wait for the server to read each sermon file and create the zipfile before it's offered for download. I was thinking about changing that behaviour but couldn't find yet a reliable way to do it.

If you don't want to use the series download, you can put a file named stop.txt into the directory and it will not create any files anymore.

Perhaps use some kind of event based progress bar on a page that is generating the sermons. i.e. something along the lines. www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/dhtmlprogress2.htm so that the user knows that the page has not timed out or something went wrong.

Andrei Chernyshev wrote: Perhaps use some kind of event based progress bar on a page that is generating the sermons. i.e. something along the lines. www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/dhtmlprogress2.htm so that the user knows that the page has not timed out or something went wrong.

This is a very good idea. It could be labelled something like "Please wait while your download is being prepared".

Alternatively, you could have a tool in the backend which causes all the zip files to be generated/updated?

Manuel Kuhs wrote:

Andrei Chernyshev wrote: Perhaps use some kind of event based progress bar on a page that is generating the sermons. i.e. something along the lines. www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex11/dhtmlprogress2.htm so that the user knows that the page has not timed out or something went wrong.

This is a very good idea. It could be labelled something like "Please wait while your download is being prepared".

Alternatively, you could have a tool in the backend which causes all the zip files to be generated/updated?

I like the idea with the progress bar. I think that should be doable. I'll probably make it so when you click on the download link, it will open a modal window with the text and progress bar and if it's finished it redirects to the file or writes the link to the file.
It will need some coding however, so can't promise when it's done.

A backend function is what I was thinking about so far, but I saw various issues. With only this function you would have to run it each time you change or add a sermon, which is a huge task for the server and an additional step when creating sermons. So it would have to be tied to the sermon (and series) form. Each time you save a sermon, the linked series zip would have to be rebuilt, and if the series was changed to another one, the old series would have to be rebuilt as well. The same if a series was edited. This is just a big task and in case of bigger series it could well break the saving of a sermon. So I didn't see a good solution so far.
The on-demand solution is just better, especially with a progress bar.

What about breaking sermon zip files into groups of 10