I'm running iss 7.0 on server 2008 SP 2. When I open a 20 mb pdf in IE with the adobe plugin or chrome it's unusable slow. Right click and save is near instant.
IE is slow enough that a 20 MB pdf takes over 10 minutes to open. It's happening from inside the network and from my remote PC and from the local machine accessing itself. Chrome is a bit faster but still unusable slow. This happens on at least 2 PDF files ,the two largest on our site.
I think the cause is that in IE I get an initial 10MB download then the rest of the file gets downloaded as a bunch of http 206 requests that are 16k in size
example header:
--request
GET http://www.nanaimo.ca/assets/Departments/Parks~Rec~Culture/Leisure~Guide/AG_Fall2013_Winter2014.pdf HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Range: bytes=14696448-14712831
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; .NET4.0E; .NET4.0C; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)
Host: www.nanaimo.ca
Connection: Keep-Alive
--response
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Type: application/pdf
Content-Range: bytes 14696448-14712831/15315529
Last-Modified: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 22:01:02 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
ETag: "dd519f8d28bece1:0"
Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 17:30:02 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 16384
Interestingly if I'm running fiddler (web traffic capture tool) when I start IE then it just does the full request and the pdf loads instantly (1gb connection to server).
Edit Changed url to a url that's more noticeable as the first url was only 10 seconds vs the expected 4 seconds. The larger file is much slower. Also increased note that this is an issue with IE and adobe reader.