file API

For those looking to have Drupal serve private files efficiently, I've posted a simple core patch that adds X-Sendfile support:
http://drupal.org/node/74472

The handling and publishing of files is one of Drupals weakest points. My site was largely based on me publishing mp3 files and code. I wanted to upload the files with FTP and publish them from an upload directory on the server. At that point I made my own "filepublishing module". And from that point of I started to ponder on what could be done with the way Drupal handles files. And now I have a rough idea of how I would like to do it.
I probably won't have the time to do any time soon, so I'm sharing it here to make shure the idea is not lost when I start to think about other things.

So, one of the big things with static file serving is that it requires an entire Drupal bootstrap, which sucks up a lot of system resources. We have work to do in Drupal/the File API to support some interesting scalability options, remote files, etc. etc.

But, I think there are some interesting models for doing highly scalable static file serving outside of Drupal (and Amazon's S3 is cool).