A 1 MB PDF test file

About this file

A 1 MB test file in PDF format, sized to exactly 1,048,576 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

1 MB is exactly the nginx client_max_body_size default (1m). Behind a reverse proxy where nobody set that directive, anything larger never reaches your application — nginx answers 413 Request Entity Too Large itself.

That makes it the ideal size for reproducing the classic incident where the app limit was raised to 10 MB yet uploads still fail at 1 MB. If the 413 never appears in your application log, the cause is almost always the proxy layer in front of it.

Getting a feel for this size

On a 10 Mbps link the transfer takes roughly 839 ms, and about 84 ms at 100 Mbps. Base64-encoded it grows to roughly 1,365 KB.

Assuming a text-oriented PDF with embedded fonts runs about 80 KB per page, this size is on the order of 13 pages. Image-heavy PDFs will hold far fewer pages at the same size.

What to check for this format

PDF starts with the %PDF- signature and keeps a cross-reference table (xref) at the end that points to every object. Because of that layout, losing the tail of the file makes the whole document unreadable — which makes PDF a good subject for truncation-detection tests.

• Whether page-count extraction and text extraction finish without timing out on large files
• The time and memory cost of thumbnail generation, i.e. rasterising the first page
• Because PDF can embed JavaScript and external references, whether your sanitisation path runs when accepting user uploads