PHP readfile vs. file_get_contents
filesystems, function, php, readfile
Solution
Readfile will read the file directly into the output buffer, and file_get_contents will load the file into memory, when you echo the result the data is copied from memory to the output buffer effectively using 2 times the memory of readfile.
Problem
I have used following code to generate zip ``` // push to download the zip header('Content-type: application/zip'); header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$zip_name.'"'); readfile($zip_name); ``` this code works fine but for unknown reasons was not working until I tried ``` // push to download the zip header('Content-type: application/zip'); header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="'.$zip_name.'"'); echo file_get_contents($zip_name); ``` I am curious about finding what is happening in both the cases