Greetings! Amazing site! :-)

I have big comics download problem which is that the connection to the server drops after about 600 - 1200 KB of data was transferred and it says "Download completed".

Yes I have referer configured as suggested and I tried to download it with Firefox and Internet Explorer but nothing seems to work! Download Managers just don't reckognize and can't handle this type of links.
In my moment of despair I even turned of my firewall, antivirus program and resident spyware blocker and all their hidden services (not recommended) and still the same thing: Download completed long before it's really completed!?

I just have plain PC with XP sp2 (internal firewall disabled), no network or other fancy stuff, I'm on common dial-up connection and have quite long experience in downloading from all sort of servers, and I've never had this kind of problem.
(At this moment all downloads work fine except from this site)

Any kind of help or suggestion is welcome! :-)
Thanks!

Any specific comic where this is happening or is it a general problem?

It's a general problem regarding all comics downloads currently available.

I waded through the script code and I downloaded several comics myself yesterday and today, and I can't find any problem. The script is doing what it should and the comics are arriving fine on my computer.

Have you tried looking into the files which you get there? Sure, they might be called .rar, but try opening them with a text editor, for example. Does that result in anything useful / understandable?

I tried it now, managed to download 1MB of "Whose Enemy Am I Anyway?", when I opened it with winrar there are couple of images and the last is unreadable, opened with text editor and this is the last line:
.X???7¹Vs?~]%s?¿·¦?@™ˆ®??wy–?g
?9¦ͺ?EE·°q>†«i‚PB?]?/T-?§·j·?Im

As I mentioned, all other downloads from huge variety of sites work fine.
I really don't have a clue?

I've noticed that one member on this forum have the same problem?

Ok, I just wanted to verify it's the actual archive you're getting and not some error message sent as a file. So that's definitely not the problem.



I'm pretty much clueless at the moment, too. I'll have to read up on some documentation tonight first.

And yes, it would help tremendously if other people having the same problem joined in here, because then we could probably see a pattern. However, I can't force anyone (like the last guy) to reply to questions, so I'm fumbling around in the dark mostly.

Just to put some small light on the subject:
Tried to download games, same problem here with bigger files, but the smaller downloads (below 1 MB)
worked fine.

Thank You for your effort!

Ah, I think we might get to the bottom of this at last! How fast is your internet connection? Is there an approximate amount of time after which the connection always drops?

Dial-up connection 48Kbps

Not approximate but exactly amount of time after which the connection always drops is always 210 seconds?!

I thought so. That is most likely what I set the default maximum execution time of a script to. I've given the download scrip unlimited time to finish now, so please try again and let me know if it works.

Nope, still annoying download limit, but now it takes 10-20 seconds longer before premature completition! Maybe I was wrong about exactly 210sec but it's definitly around that number.

Although this is not good, I'm fairly sure we are on the right track. I've made further moficiations now - could you try again?

(all this just refers to the comics for now by the way as I won't synchronize the code with the games section before finding a real solution)

Edited by Mr Creosote at 13:59 on August, 23rd 2006

Still the same, download completed after 3 minutes 20 sec.

This is getting stranger and stranger. I've changed something else again, please try it out. Make sure you clear your cache before to rule any side-effects out.

Still download completed after 3 minutes 25 sec now!

This becomes neverending.



Maybe it could be some problem on my side, but after installation I did not change any internet related settings or installed programs which do that, any ideas?

I did some more testing on couple of websites that don't support download managers like yours I presume.
I was using my web browsers Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 6 and managed to download files from 2MB - 8MB without any problems.

I hope that this will bring some light to this subject!

I know that in the past I've had problems trying to download files larger than 1meg or so from any website while using a gecko based browser. Downloads would always end at around 700k, yet would say they were complete.

I just tried it and got the same results you did. Only 1.07M out of 4.5M downloaded, download ended after approx 2.5 mins. The file recieved is the actual archive, but not the complete archive. I am also on dialup.

Edited by Cypherswipe at 18:30 on August, 23rd 2006

A few words of explanation: As you will already have surmised, I assume this is a timeout issue - the script which sends the file just quitting at some point. As a final try, I've set all these configuration values to insanely high numbers now (50 minutes). If it still doesn't work (let me know), it has to be something else.

As for comparisons with other sites, this is a little tricky. I know a certain way to make all the downloads work for you, however, it would open the site to abuse by other sites (them linking directly to our files). We've been a victim of this abonimable behaviour for years, and I can't afford those exploding bills anymore (since I tightened security to what it is now, bandwidth consumption has been more than halfed, giving you a hint of how big the problem was before). That is why this isn't a realistic option anymore and why I'm trying to fix the scripts instead.

Same problem here but there are two differences:

1.It happens only on this site!
2.I used Firefox and IE with same results!

I tried a couple more times. one cut off at approx 220 seconds, the other at 243 seconds (used a stopwatch on that one. might be off by a second or two, but no more). When it reaches the "end", it stops progressing for a few seconds, then the dialog closes. Here's a screenshot of the dialog just before it closed:
I'm currently running an experiment using a download manager (I won't say exactly how I got the manager to work ). It too, stalled at the key point, but then it restarted the download from the beginning (don't know why it didn't resume). I let it run through twice and it cut off at roughly the same point each time (which was also the same point that the browser cut off).