large files stop downloading

Over the last week I've gotten complaints from visitors that they were unable to open zip files downloaded from my site. It turned out that the downloads were stopping after a few seconds, at 170K or whatever point (it wasn't consistent). The zip files range from 2MB to 6MB in size. Other visitors can download them fine. I myself have downloaded the files fine from two different machines, although they're on the same internet connection.

One person deleted all temporary internet files from his cache and the download of one file worked, but not the other. He deleted the partial download, tried it again, and he got the whole thing that time.

Perhaps I could tell everyone to empty their cache and keep trying, but that's an inelegant solution and doesn't address the fact that there's something happening that shouldn't be, and it may be something that my webhost has control over. To me it sounds like bad caching somewhere, but I don't know much about that.

Shortly before I started getting complaints, there was an upgrade done on the servers, or more precisely:

"Apache will be upgraded on all shared servers from 1.3.27-28 to 1.3.29 and we will piggy back a PHP upgrade on all machines from 4.3.1-3 to 4.3.4. "

I don't know if that would have anything to do with it, but something's causing this all of a sudden. The last change I made to any of my .htaccess files was a month or two before the complaints I started getting a week ago.

Also, if it makes a difference, mod_expires wasn't included in the Apache upgrade, so my website was disabled until people started emailing me saying it was down. I edited all the .htaccess files to comment out the ExpiresByType and ExpiresDefault directives. The website was functional again, and at that point I started getting the complaints.

My webhost wants me to give them traceroutes from some of the visitors to the web site, so I'm trying to get some of the visitors with problems to run a tracert command to my site. Naturally, most don't reply, or are using Macs.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Dave

 

 

 

 

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