Dialup download timeout

I opened my new site on Saturday, got some customers who purchased items - that has a nice sound to it! - and most seemed to go very smoothly.

One customer, however, has not been able to download the products without getting timed out and told to log back in.

He is using dial-up, the files are about 5 MB in size, and he gets about 800 KB before getting kicked off after 20-30 minutes

Here is what he sent me regarding his problem:

It is where your site times out after 20 to 30 minutes and requires you to login again. I hope I am explaining this right. When your site times out and requires you to login again it stops the download. Tried it 3 times and got around 800kb when the timeout and login happens.

I looked at the session settings in Admin/Configuration/Session and they looked OK to me - except that the Session Directory was set to a file on my local server! - even though this is the online server site...I changed it to "/tmp", and have sent a request that he try it again - but is this the likely cause? I see several threads on this kind of thing but happening on checkout using PayPal - and these downloads are free with a coupon he is using.

I also suggested he move around the site every few minutes, to avoid any inactivity timeout.

He's in Europe so I'm not sure how long it will take to hear from him - but for my own information, should this solution actually take care of the problem?

You might want to try putting the file he wants somewhere outside of ZC and sending him a link he can use without logging in. It may not even be ZC that is timing out.

On the other hand, some bloke with a modem, on the other side of the planet, who can manage only 800k in 20 or 30 min, trying to get a free file...

You might want to (politely) tell him "sorry Charlie, come back when you have entered the 21st century".

kiddo:

You might want to try putting the file he wants somewhere outside of ZC and sending him a link he can use without logging in. It may not even be ZC that is timing out.

On the other hand, some bloke with a modem, on the other side of the planet, who can manage only 800k in 20 or 30 min, trying to get a free file...

You might want to (politely) tell him "sorry Charlie, come back when you have entered the 21st century".

Yeah, well...:lookaroun ...you know these starving artists...:blink:

I may do the off site location if it comes to it - thing is, I know he's not the only one still using dialup...so I'd like to find a solution that fixes this instead of a klutzy workaround.

Thanks.

OK, I heard back from the customer - he tried changing pages within the site every 5 minutes or so during the download, he didn't get the notice to log on again, but the download did still stop around 20 minutes into the run.

Is there a timer on the down-loader that ZC is using, and can it be changed to allow a longer download?

Also, he tried this with both IE & Firefox, same thing. Could there be a problem with the settings he has on those - perhaps turn buffering on or off?

This isn't a zencart problem. The customer's dial-up is just cutting out. You may have to split your file into smaller bits so that he can download it. Or e-mail it to him in smaller pieces.

I had this issue on an oscommerce site, and that's what I had to do to get around it.

momoftwo:

This isn't a zencart problem. The customer's dial-up is just cutting out. You may have to split your file into smaller bits so that he can download it. Or e-mail it to him in smaller pieces.

I had this issue on an oscommerce site, and that's what I had to do to get around it.

With the upped timeout to 1 hr, 20 min, he was able to download about 80% of the file without the timeout hitting - so I don't think it's his service.

Is there anything like a "resume" facility in the ZC downloader - so the download can be resumed if it was interrupted?

As to splitting the file into segments, how do I do that? The zip is around 4 MB, all one exe file...how do I break that up into pieces?