What could cause downloads to stop or stall at 90% or so?

October 18, 2007 12:33 PM

What could cause downloads to stop or stall at 90% or so?

We've got 2 bonded T1s at work and we're seeing some really weird issues. So far AT&T has been unable to help. What happens is that downloads from many different sites all just kind of peter out at 40 or 90%. If I try to restart them they'll either do the same thing or the download rate will say something like 700 bytes/sec.

According to bandwidth tests we still have a lot of bandwidth so it doesnt seem bandwidth related. This seems to have started after we got the 2nd T1. AT&T says the line is okay. Unfortunately, we dont have any nice networking equipment that gives reports or anything. Nor do I have admin rights to the router.

Has anyone experienced such a thing? Or perhaps make suggestions to try other things? DSL reports tests report a good line. MTU seems fine too.

posted by the ghost of Ken Lay to technology (4 comments total)

Hm. Sounds like latency between you and the server(s) you are connecting with. Try this: Run a traceroute between your client machine and the server. See if any particular hop or group of hops have high ping times. It may not be you or AT&T, it could be an intervening ISP, or the server's ISP. For that matter, if these are extremely popular servers, they may be throttling bandwidth on their own, in order to be able to better serve all their clients. The other possibility is that the file that is being served is corrupt in the last 10% of the file being served. That would prevent the FTP server from reading the file, and thus delivering it to your client.
posted by Fferret at 12:58 PM on October 18, 2007

What kind of download? If it's bittorrents, the problem is usually malicious fake seeders, and I'll talk about it more if you confirm.
posted by cmiller at 2:08 PM on October 18, 2007

Its the 18 meg file on this page:

http://downloads.qliktech.com/qvwebdownloads/Release8.asp

But its been other stuff like download.microsoft.com, youtube, etc. I can RDP to my home machine and download this file fine, but here at work it gets stuck at exactly 90%

Nope, no torrents. All these downloads are http.
posted by the ghost of Ken Lay at 2:39 PM on October 18, 2007

NVIDIA's hardware firewall used to cause similar problems for me.
posted by springload at 4:54 PM on October 18, 2007