A 5 MB GIF test file

About this file

A 5 MB test file in GIF format, sized to exactly 5,242,880 bytes. Free to download with no signup, for verifying upload limits and file-handling behaviour.

The MD5, SHA-1 and SHA-256 values listed above are the real digests of this file. Recomputing them after download confirms the transfer was not corrupted, and they double as known-good expected values when testing a hashing library.

What this size means in practice

5 MB lands in a useful spot for probing PHP defaults. upload_max_filesize ships as 2M and post_max_size as 8M, so on an untouched PHP install this file is rejected by upload_max_filesize while still fitting inside the POST body cap.

Serverless platforms cut in even earlier: AWS Lambda caps synchronous invocation payloads at 6 MB and Vercel Serverless Functions cap request bodies at 4.5 MB. Use this file to verify what happens when the request dies before your handler ever runs.

Getting a feel for this size

On a 10 Mbps link the transfer takes roughly 4.2 seconds, and about 419 ms at 100 Mbps. Base64-encoded it grows to roughly 6,827 KB.

Estimating a photographic GIF at roughly 0.5 bytes per pixel, this size works out to around 10,485,760 pixels — about 3,739 × 2,804 px at a 4:3 aspect ratio. Compression varies enormously with image content, so treat this purely as an order-of-magnitude figure.

What to check for this format

GIF begins with the ASCII signature GIF87a or GIF89a and uses a palette of up to 256 colours. Because it can hold multiple animation frames, code written for single-frame images either grabs only the first frame or, worse, expands every frame and consumes far more memory than expected.

• Whether resizing an animated GIF preserves the animation or flattens it to a still
• Whether thumbnail generation correctly extracts the first frame
• Whether you cap memory when expanding all frames — usage grows with frame count multiplied by resolution