Mailing List Archive

On 11/30/98 8:45 AM Dave Witzel (dave@ForumOne.com) wrote:

>I've got a particular PDF file i care about that is large (over 6 meg) and
>has a lot of requests. Analog reports that 3/4's of the requests are "206
>Partial content". my question is "what does a '206' mean in practice?" did
>users get part of a PDF file (which i assume is useless)? or did they abort
>the connection? or did the browser break the download into multiple requests
>(in which case my estimate of times the file was downloaded is too high)?
>or does this represent some kind of caching behavior?

The PDFViewer plug-in from Adobe, which allows you to view PDF files
directly in your browser, will only read portions of the entire PDF file.
It uses partial content transfers to get only those portions of the PDF
file that it needs to display the pages the user actualy views.

This only works if your PDF file has been written with the correct
"optimization", the web server supports partial transfers, and the user
is viewing with the PDFViewer plugin.

There can be quite a few partial transfers for a single client. As they
page through the document the viewer will fetch different portions of the
file.

In almost all cases there is a savings in total bandwidth.

Jason

-----------------
Jason@Summary.Net
-----------------
Dr. Seuss books . . . can be read and enjoyed on several levels. For
example, 'One Fish Two Fish, Red Fish Blue Fish' can be deconstructed
as a searing indictment of the narrow-minded binary counting system.
-- Peter van der Linden, Expert C Programming, Deep C Secrets


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On Mon, Nov 30, 1998 at 08:45:15AM -0500, Dave Witzel wrote:
> I've got a particular PDF file i care about that is large (over 6 meg) and
> has a lot of requests. Analog reports that 3/4's of the requests are "206
> Partial content". my question is "what does a '206' mean in practice?" did
> users get part of a PDF file (which i assume is useless)? or did they abort
> the connection? or did the browser break the download into multiple requests
> (in which case my estimate of times the file was downloaded is too high)?
> or does this represent some kind of caching behavior?

That's a feature of 'modern' browsers: to make it easier for users to
make use of a PDF file, it breaks the requests into chunks. (It sucks
downloading 6M files and waiting forever to get them to display, so the
byte-range trick works to make pdf's useful).

The count from such things is no doubt high: you'd probably have to
total the bytes sent and use that as a sort of indicator. (Or use
something like mod_usertrack and follow it with cookies.)

--
Brian Moore | "The Zen nature of a spammer resembles
Sysadmin, C/Perl Hacker | a cockroach, except that the cockroach
Usenet Vandal | is higher up on the evolutionary chain."
Netscum, Bane of Elves. Peter Olson, Delphi Postmaster
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