Handling Large Media Files Efficiently in Web Apps (A Real Challenge I Faced)

I wanted to share a recent challenge I faced while working on media-heavy web applications and get some feedback or optimization tips from the community.

I’ve been working on a project called Tvmon, a platform focused on delivering entertainment and streaming content efficiently to users across different devices and network speeds. It’s been a great learning experience — but one recurring issue I’ve faced is how to handle large media file uploads, caching, and playback effectively without slowing down the overall user experience.

⚙️ The Problem

When users upload large video or image files, it not only impacts server performance but also causes memory leaks in certain cases — especially when multiple users upload simultaneously. Initially, I tried a simple Node.js + Express + Multer setup for handling file uploads:

import express from 'express';
import multer from 'multer';
import fs from 'fs';
const app = express();

const storage = multer.diskStorage({
  destination: (req, file, cb) => {
    cb(null, './uploads');
  },
  filename: (req, file, cb) => {
    cb(null, Date.now() + '-' + file.originalname);
  }
});

const upload = multer({ storage });

app.post('/upload', upload.single('media'), (req, res) => {
  res.send({ message: 'File uploaded successfully!', file: req.file });
});

app.listen(3000, () => console.log('Server running on port 3000'));

This setup worked fine for smaller files, but as soon as I started handling videos above 100MB, the app began to struggle — high memory usage, slow response times, and sometimes timeouts.

🧩 What I Tried Next

To fix this, I experimented with streaming uploads using Node.js streams instead of buffering entire files in memory. Here’s the adjusted part of the code:

app.post('/stream-upload', (req, res) => {
  const filePath = `./uploads/${Date.now()}.mp4`;
  const writeStream = fs.createWriteStream(filePath);

  req.pipe(writeStream);

  req.on('end', () => {
    res.send({ message: 'File uploaded successfully via stream!' });
  });

  req.on('error', (err) => {
    console.error('Upload failed:', err);
    res.status(500).send({ error: 'Upload failed' });
  });
});

This reduced server load dramatically and made uploads far more stable.

💡 What I Learned

Working on Tvmon taught me how crucial stream-based architecture and CDN caching can be for performance when you’re building a platform that handles large, media-rich content. I also learned that using a reverse proxy (like Nginx) to offload static files is essential when scaling.

Here’s a snippet from my Nginx config:

location /uploads/ {
    root /var/www/html;
    expires 30d;
    add_header Cache-Control "public";
}

🤔 Still Looking for Insights

Even with all these optimizations, I’m still looking for better approaches to:

Handle parallel uploads more efficiently

Reduce latency during streaming playback

Manage file versioning or partial caching

If anyone here has experience with large-scale file processing or streaming backends, I’d love to hear your thoughts. How do you balance speed, memory management, and reliability in similar setups?

Thanks for reading — and I hope sharing my experience helps others who might be facing the same issues!