Serving large files with C# HttpListener

Question

I\'m trying to use HttpListener to serve static files, and this works well with small files. When file sizes grow larger (tested with 350 and 600MB files), the server chokes

Answer 1

You didn't show us the other critical part how you initialized HttpListener. Therefore I tried your code with the one below and it worked

HttpListener listener = new HttpListener();
listener.Prefixes.Add("http://*:8080/");
listener.Start();
Task.Factory.StartNew(() =>
{
    while (true)
    {
        HttpListenerContext context = listener.GetContext();
        Task.Factory.StartNew((ctx) =>
        {
            WriteFile((HttpListenerContext)ctx, @"C:\LargeFile.zip");
        }, context,TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning);
    }
},TaskCreationOptions.LongRunning);

WriteFile is your code where Thread.Sleep( 200 ); is removed.

If you want to see the full code of it.

---

void WriteFile(HttpListenerContext ctx, string path)
{
    var response = ctx.Response;
    using (FileStream fs = File.OpenRead(path))
    {
        string filename = Path.GetFileName(path);
        //response is HttpListenerContext.Response...
        response.ContentLength64 = fs.Length;
        response.SendChunked = false;
        response.ContentType = System.Net.Mime.MediaTypeNames.Application.Octet;
        response.AddHeader("Content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + filename);

        byte[] buffer = new byte[64 * 1024];
        int read;
        using (BinaryWriter bw = new BinaryWriter(response.OutputStream))
        {
            while ((read = fs.Read(buffer, 0, buffer.Length)) > 0)
            {
                bw.Write(buffer, 0, read);
                bw.Flush(); //seems to have no effect
            }

            bw.Close();
        }

        response.StatusCode = (int)HttpStatusCode.OK;
        response.StatusDescription = "OK";
        response.OutputStream.Close();
    }
}