XMLHttpRequest 206 Partial Content

Question

I would like to issue a partial content request from an XMLHttpRequest object in javascript. I\'m loading a large binary file from the server, and I\'d rather stream it from

Answer 1

I think I figured out why the 206 request wasn't working. With gzip compression enabled, the range header gets ignored if the outgoing data can be gzipped.

The file I was requesting was a large binary file, which nginx interpreted as having mimetype application/octet-stream. This is one of the mimetypes that gets gzipped. If I renamed the file to have a .png filetype, the image/png mimetype is not gzipped, and hence the range request works correctly.

This is also why setting the Accept-Encoding header with curl to identity also allows the range request to work fine. However, I cannot change that header from an XHR.

Solution: Change the mimetype table on the server!