Large File Download

Question

Internet Explorer has a file download limit of 4GB (2 GB on IE6). Firefox does not have this problem (haven\'t tested safari yet) (More info here: http://support.microsoft.com/

Answer 1

@jjnguy I'm looking for a java applet or ActiveX component that will do that for me. These are non-technical users so we really just want to have them click download and the full file ends up in the specified location

Answer 2

If you don't want to write java code in-house, there are commercial applet solutions available:

• Vault
• MyDownloder

Both of them have eval versions that you can download and test.

Answer 3

bittorrent?

There have been a few web-based versions already (bitlet, w3btorrent), and Azureus was built using java, so it's definitely possible.

Edit: @TonyB is it limited to port 80?

Answer 4

Take a look at cURL. This article describes how to do a multi-part simultaneous download via HTTP. I've used cURL in the past to manage FTP downloads of files over 300GB.

Another tip: You can boost download times even more if you increase the size of the TCP Window on the client's NIC configuration. Set it as high as the OS allows and you should see up to 2x improvement depending on your physical network. This worked for me on Windows 2000 and 2003 when FTPing over a WAN. The down side is it may increase overhead for all other network traffic that wants only a few KB for a network packet, but is now forced to send/recv in 64KB packets. Your mileage may vary.

Edit: What exactly is this you're trying to accomplish? Who is the audience? I'm assumed for a bit that you're looking to do this over your own network; but you seem to imply the client side is someone on the internet. I think we need clearer requirements.

Answer 5

The problem with the applet approach mentioned is that unless you have the end user modify their java security properties your applet will not have permission to save to the hard drive.

It may be possible using Java Web Start (aka JNLP). I think that if it is a signed app it can get the extra permission to write to the hard drive. This is not too different from the download an exe approach. The problem with this is that the user has to have the correct version of Java installed and has to have the Java Web Start capability setup correctly.

I would recommend the exe approach as it will be the easiest for the non-technical users to use.

Answer 6

What about saying "We recommend that you install Free Download Manager to download this file. You will have the added benefit of being able to resume the file and accelerate the download."

Personally I never download anything using the built in browser download tool unless I have to (e.g. Gmail attachments)