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Digital Download, download stopping before complete file downloaded

Product: ShopSite Pro
Version: 6.x or greater
Platform: ALL

I am using the Digital Download feature in ShopSite Pro v6.x or greater to sell some large digital files. When someone with a slow internet connection (28.8K modem, etc) purchases one of these items then tries to download it by clicking on the link in the thankyou screen or the email receipt, they only get part of the file before the download stops. Why is this happening?

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Solution ID: S5474

Webservers come with pre-configured timeouts that apply to all cgi processes started by the webserver, like the download.cgi that ShopSite uses to send the file to the shopper. If the download to these shoppers with slow internet connections takes longer than this timeout period, the download.cgi process may be killed by the webserver.

In order to prevent this, you should increase (or have your sysadmin increase) the timeout settings on your webserver.

For the Microsoft IIS webserver (on Windows 2000), the setting is located in the Master WWW Properties for the server. Open the IIS Management Console, right click on the machine name (above the list of sites), select Properties, then in the Master Properties section of the window that pops up, click the Edit button for the WWW Service. This will bring up a window similar to the configuration for each site, but global for the server. Click on the Home Directories tab, then in the Application Settings section click the Configuration button. In the Application Configuration window that pops up, select the Process Options tab. The 'CGI script timeout' setting here is the one that should be increased. The default is either 300 seconds (5 minutes) or 900 seconds (15 minutes). Once you have made the change to increase this setting, make sure you click the Apply button on each configuration window before clicking the OK button to close it.

In Apache-based webserver configuration files, the timeout setting is called 'Timeout' and is usually found in the configuration file called httpd.conf. The default number of seconds varies. Once a change has been made to this setting and the setting file saved, the Apache-based webserver process should be reloaded or restarted.

To determine the number of seconds you will need to set these settings to, determine how long it would take (in seconds) to download your largest Digital Download file via the slowest connection you want to allow (i.e. 28.8K modem, 56K modem, etc).

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