/pub directory behavior

[hollygds]

Hi all! My store is made of mostly downloadable products (in form of .zips) and my store is very active, lots of ordering going on at any given time.

I'm troubleshooting some intermittent but ongoing customer service complaints about downloads being corrupt. I'm on 1.3.7.

What is the typical lifespan of a subdirectory in the /pub directory? Is it there for the duration of a download? Or is there until the download is actually started?

The reason I ask is that I only ever see one random subdirectory in there when I continue refresh over a period of say a minute. The subdirectory name will change radomly as expected...but only one directory exists. If two customers click a download button from their respective orders at the same time, wouldn't I see more than one subdirectory listed there? If so, I'm wondering if that is the root of my problems and I don't have a setting on the server, in php.ini or wherever properly set.

FYI, I'm on a completely dedicated server.

Thanks in advance for any insight!

[DrByte]

Files are "cleaned up" whenever a new download is started.
If that's not acceptable for your use, try turning off "Download by Redirect" and enable "Download by Streaming" instead.

[hollygds]

Thanks for your response. So while one person is downloading something else the file could get deleted because someone else started a download?