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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T04:34:58+00:00

This post started as a question on ServerFault ( https://serverfault.com/questions/131156/user-receiving-partial-downloads ) but I determined

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This post started as a question on ServerFault ( https://serverfault.com/questions/131156/user-receiving-partial-downloads ) but I determined that our php script was the culprit. So I’m issuing an updated question here about what I believe is the actual issue.

I am using a php script to verify permissions and then serve up a file for users of my website to download. Most of the time, this works, but recently one user has been seeing problems with larger downloads. He is only getting ~80% of downloads for files that are > 100MB in size. Also, all downloads from this script fail to report a filesize. Further, tests revealed that the same user COULD reliably download each of the failed files if given a direct link (at which point the filesize is reported).

Here’s the relevant snippet of code that we are using to serve the file:

header("Content-type:$contenttype");
$len = filesize($filename);
header("Content-Length: $len");
header("Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=".$title.".".$ext);
readfile($filename);

Note that $contenttype, $filename, $title, and $ext are all set correctly before we get here. These have been triple-checked. None of them are the problem. Also, $len does provide the correct filesize.

While researching this issue, I came across this post: Content-Length header always zero

It seems that I am encountering the same issue. When I use the script, I get chunked encoding on the file and no size is set for content-length. I’m hypothesizing that something is going wrong on the large downloads, leading him to get a zero-length chunk before the end of the file.

Here’s what the headers look like for a direct request:

http://www.grinderschool.com/videos/zfff5061b65ae00e8b21/KillsAids021.wmv

GET /videos/zfff5061b65ae00e8b21/KillsAids021.wmv HTTP/1.1
Host: www.grinderschool.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://www.grinderschool.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=14&p=29468
Cookie: style_cookie=printonly; phpbb3_7c544_u=2; phpbb3_7c544_k=44b832912e5f887d; phpbb3_7c544_sid=e8852df42e08cc1b2250300c2897f78f; __utma=174624884.2719561324781918700.1251850714.1270986325.1270989003.575; __utmz=174624884.1264524375.411.12.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=low%20stakes%20poker%20videos; phpbb3_cmviy_k=; phpbb3_cmviy_u=2; phpbb3_cmviy_sid=d8df5c0943863004ca40ef9c392d371d; __utmb=174624884.4.10.1270989003; __utmc=174624884
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:57:41 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
Last-Modified: Sun, 04 Apr 2010 12:51:06 GMT
Etag: "eb42d6-7d9b843-48368aa6dc280"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 131708995
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=30
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: video/x-ms-wmv

And here’s what they look like for the request answered by my script:

http://www.grinderschool.com/download_video_test.php?t=KillsAids021&format=wmv

GET /download_video_test.php?t=KillsAids021&format=wmv HTTP/1.1
Host: www.grinderschool.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.3) Gecko/20100401 Firefox/3.6.3 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: style_cookie=printonly; phpbb3_7c544_u=2; phpbb3_7c544_k=44b832912e5f887d; phpbb3_7c544_sid=e8852df42e08cc1b2250300c2897f78f; __utma=174624884.2719561324781918700.1251850714.1270986325.1270989003.575; __utmz=174624884.1264524375.411.12.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=low%20stakes%20poker%20videos; phpbb3_cmviy_k=; phpbb3_cmviy_u=2; phpbb3_cmviy_sid=d8df5c0943863004ca40ef9c392d371d; __utmb=174624884.4.10.1270989003; __utmc=174624884

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 2010 12:58:02 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.14 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.14 OpenSSL/0.9.8l DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.11
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=KillsAids021.wmv
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Keep-Alive: timeout=10, max=30
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: video/x-ms-wmv

So the question is…what can I do to make downloads from the script work properly? Again, for 99% of users, it works as is (though I find it annoying now that no filesize is reported and thus that no time estimate can be computed about the download).

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s your GZIP compression. When you specify a content length but turn compression on, it gums everything up. It’s happened to me a few times: try turning it off in your script.

    Generally you’d turn it on with:

    ob_start("ob_gzhandler");

    …so just comment that line out. If that’s not in your code, chances are there’s a setting in either your php.ini file somewhere or your apache.conf/conf.d.

    Hope this helps!

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