A 5 MB PDF test file

About this file

A 5 MB test file in PDF 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.

Assuming a text-oriented PDF with embedded fonts runs about 80 KB per page, this size is on the order of 64 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