I'm in the middle of technically speccing a file uploading API that will be dealing with a lot of large (250MB+) files.
What I want to avoid as much as possible is the web server eating up a whole load of memory during the file upload, which I know to some degree is possible to avoid.
Also, I can't use Flash or Silverlight to split the files, which would probably significantly decrease memory usage.
I understand that PHP is largely dependent on its host web server software for upload performance. With this in mind, is Apache the best one for the job or should I consider nginx or others?
If PHP itself is the largest bottleneck, then would it be worthwhile considering some sort of hybrid solution? And if so, what language would it be?