Jani Hartikainen has a suggestions of a way to "send files better" in his latest post by using the mod_xsendfile module for Apache and a bit of PHP.

I have previously written a quick post on making files downloadable through PHP scripts. The example in the post reads the file itself into a variable, and as pointed out in the comments, it’s not necessarily a very good idea especially if you deal with large files. Recently at work, we needed a reliable way to send files to users’ browser, and I decided to take a look at mod_xsendfile, as suggested by Tom Graham.

He starts with some of the benefits of using the xsendfile method over other, more traditional ways. Moving on, he gets to the good stuff - download, installation and a code example of how to use the module (via a X-Sendfile header).