Do files get sent over the wire before download

Caroline B Thanx for your tip! Oron Joffe It's not possible to answer this generically. Whether a document will open within the browser or download first depends on the browser and its configuration , the file format and to a certain extent the design of the web site. However, note that even when just "previewing" a document, the entire document is downloaded to the local drive, to a temp folder at least for "ordinary documents such as Word, PDFs etc , so in terms of speed and bandwidth it makes little difference, and arguably, you'll be saving yourself some bandwidth by saving the files in the first place, since you'll not need to download them twice.

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Caroline B. Hello everyone, thank you for your comments. Yes, you can't just read the content without downloading it. Oh sorry, there is no settings option like that. You can't preview something before downloading it - the very nature of previewing something means it will have already been downloaded. You just find out some document file over the net.

Depends on the website. For example, gmail offers the ability to "view" or "download" Note: if you want to make sure that a file is virus-free before downloading it, there are a number of websites that do that. It's not possible to answer this generically. Improve this question. I can't parse what you wrote. Are you saying that the request eventually ends up at Net::HTTP, which is the one who really writes to the socket, but it writes whatever it wants and doesn't actually tell its caller what it wrote?

Surely it must, if the answer below is correct? Maybe some changes end up in the ::Request object, but definitely not all, which is why the answer below said to use a wire sniffer or a dummy server. Show 1 more comment.

Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. So, no easy way with just the stuff that comes with LWP though? MarkVY there is. It's quite simple actually. But it will give you the same thing I guess.

You'll have a request object that you can convert to a string. I have a talk about how it works at TPCiA but the videos are not up yet. Okay, I think I see what you did here. HTTP 1. Ranges are easy to grab from the server by requesting a range.

The server responds with a Partial Response and only physically pushes down the requested number of bytes. This works great — if the server supports this. The server and the request responding has to support it.

Most modern Web servers support range requests natively so this works out of the box on static content. Fiddler is a proxy and as such retrieves requests on behalf of the client. You send an HTTP request, and Fiddler then retrieves it for you and feeds it back to your application. This means the entire response is retrieved unless HTTP headers specify otherwise. It tells you when it connects, reads, writes and closes connections and shows bytecounts etc.

Notice that it seems to indicate that the request buffered the entire content! The actual data on the wire ends up being only 19, so this line is definitely wrong. Between this line and the lines that show the actual data read from the connection and the final count, the values that come from the system trace are not reliable for telling what actual network traffic was incurred.

So, that led me back to using WireShark. WireShark is a great network packet level sniffer and it works great for these sorts of things. But I can get the data that I need. From this I could tell that on the long k request I was not reading the entire response, but on smaller responses I was in fact getting the entire response.

This may seem silly since you could capture directly in fiddler but remember that Fiddler is a proxy so it will pull data from the server then forward it. The reconstructed trace in Fiddler from my test looks like this:. Here with the k file I noticed that the actual data that came over the wire is about 20k.

There are a number of ideas to reduce the traffic in some situations, but none of them work for all cases. So, looking at this, we could either worry about the packet sizes, or possibly include some type of additional parameter in the request to tell the server to only send back a small sample size that is within the bounds of the packet size you are looking for. This will not work on static pages of course, however dynamic pages could take a query string or body parameter that tells the server that you are merely testing uptime, at which point the server can send back a handshake that confirms that it is alive..

That way, you minimize the traffic on the wire. This could be done in some form of base page that all of your other pages inherit from or reference in some way that listens for this parameter and automatically writes a simple response and closes the response at the application layer. Realistically, if you are writing a generic monitoring tool, you might not be able to enforce this, however, if you are writing one just for your own purposes, this might be an easy way to accomplish your goal.

Ad-free experience sponsored by:. Share on:. On this page:. NET - Part 1. Is this content useful to you? Consider making a small donation to show your support. Posted in. NET Networking. Harry Athey January 30, NET HttpClient to capture partial Responses If all you are trying to do is verify that the site is functional, why not try something like getting the full request once in a while depending on what frequency is important for the individual site, or policy or whatever.

It provides support for two modes of transferring data: the buffered mode and the streamed mode. While in the buffered mode this is the default mode supported by WCF the data is stored in the buffer in its entirety until the data transfer is complete.

In the streamed mode, the data is read in chunks, and the receiver of the message can start processing the message until the transfer is complete. While the buffered mode is the default and needs the message to be sent to the receiver in its entirety before the message can be processed at the consumer's end, the streamed mode is useful for messages that are large in size. Processing large chunks of data requires a large buffer and a lot of available memory both at the client and also at the server side, hence you need to use streamed mode, which improves the scalability of the service as you don't need to have large memory buffers to hold data.

To enable the any of the modes described above, you need to take advantage of the TransferMode property. This property can have any one of the following values. ServiceModel namespace. The following code snippet shows how the TransferMode property can be set in the service configuration file.