By considering these options, you should be able to find a suitable workaround for the "total size of requested files is too large for ziponthefly" error.

| User type | Action | |-----------|--------| | | Download fewer files at once. Contact site admin. | | Site owner (non-technical) | Ask hosting support to increase PHP limits. Or switch to a plugin that pre-generates ZIPs. | | Developer | Replace ZipOnTheFly with ZipStream-PHP, pre-generated cron ZIPs, or cloud signed URLs. | | Agency / enterprise | Implement a dedicated download server (e.g., using Nginx’s X-Accel or Apache’s X-SendFile ) for large static ZIPs. |

Instead of creating ZIPs on request, generate them in advance via a cron job.

The error triggers when the cumulative size of all requested files exceeds a certain threshold. This threshold is not universal; it depends on your server’s configuration. The primary culprits are:

Users have reported this error when trying to download collections as large as 105 GB or 128 GB .

Creating a ZIP without compression (store mode) is faster and uses less memory. In PHP, you can change: