Question

I currently have a download site for my school that is based in .net. We offer anything from antivirus, autocad, spss, office, and a number of large applications for students to download. It’s currently setup to handle them in 1 of 2 ways; anything over 800 megs is directly accessable through a seperate website while under 800 megs is secured behind .net code using a filestream to feed it to the user in 10,000 byte chunks. I have all sorts of issues with feeding downloads this way… I’d like to be able to secure the large downloads, but the .net site just can’t handle it, and the smaller files will often fail. Is there a better approach to this?

edit – I just wanted to update on how I finally solved this: I ended up adding my download directory as a virtual directory in iis and specified custom http handler. The handler grabbed the file name from the request and checked for permissions based on that, then either redirected the users to a error/login page, or let the download continue. I’ve had no problems with this solution, and I’ve been on it for probably 7 months now, serving files several gigs in size.

Answer 1

I have two recommendations:

• Increase the buffer size so that there are less iterations

AND/OR

• Do not call IsClientConnected on each iteration.

The reason is that according to Microsoft Guidelines:

Response.IsClientConnected has some costs, so only use it before an operation that takes at least, say 500 milliseconds (that’s a long time if you’re trying to sustain a throughput of dozens of pages per second). As a general rule of thumb, don’t call it in every iteration of a tight loop