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Downloads sometimes are interrupted at different size

A lot users of one of my website behind Nginx which serves some Dropbox files that I'm sharing, starting from around 2/3 months ago, tell me that file downloads (usually file from 50MB to 2GB) are interrupted. They told me the downloads stop but every user refers stop at different size.

I noticed in the last period of time the users that are complaining this are increasingly. Personally, I tried to replicate the problem but without success. I tried to use 3/4 different internet connections and different browsers but for me has always worked.

My urls are something like this:

https://www.example.com/downloadable/download/link/id/MC51NzMyMDAwMCAxNzAyMjA0MDExMTA4NDgxMjAwNjE2/

and redirect to something like this:

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/y33dnhk2rgquju4/testfile.zip?dl=1

Did you guys change something?

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Greg-DB

I'm not aware of any changes that should be causing failures like that.

Do you have any error/logging output to share regarding this issue?

Also, how long do the connections run before they fail?

kamzata

I'll try to produce some logs. I don't know exactly how log the connections run because I'm not able to reproduce the issue and users don't help so much. However, I also set

proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

in my Nginx configuration (as written here) but nothing's changed.

Users refer they receive Failed Network Error after undefined amount of time.

I noticed if I share a Dropbox file the url is now something like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/lbomlpvqbye7q02fmz5do/test-file.zip?rlkey=j2rp6l4hmfiybizzfh7tx5y4i&dl=1

which is different from the url structure that I had before (apart from the domain www.dropbox.com vs dl.dropboxusercontent.com):

http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/y33dnhk2rgquju4/testfile.zip?dl=1

Edit:

I watched the logs for both Nginx (which acts as reverse proxy) and Apache (which is behind Nginx) and I cannot see any errors.

I can just see the GET request to the website url:

Nginx log:

79.41.123.28 - - [12/Dec/2023:17:24:42 +0100] "GET //downloadable/download/link/id/MC51NzMyMDAwMCAxNzAyMjA0MDExMTA4NDgxMjAwNjE2 HTTP/2.0" 301 162 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Apache log:

79.41.123.28 - - [12/Dec/2023:17:24:42 +0100] "GET //downloadable/download/link/id/MC51NzMyMDAwMCAxNzAyMjA0MDExMTA4NDgxMjAwNjE2 HTTP/1.0" 302 1257 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/119.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Greg-DB

Thanks for following up. If you can collect some more details from the affected users, that may be helpful. For instance, it may be helpful to know:

do the failures occur a specific amount of time? (as that may indicate a specific timeout)
are they using a particular browser?
are they in a particular region or using a particular ISP?
are they using any firewall, proxy, VPN, etc.?

As you saw, there are different types of shared links, but they all should support downloading file content. Both of your sample Dropbox links in your latest message are working for me.

And thanks for checking your logs. If you are able to enable any additional logging around the connections to Dropbox itself though, that may be helpful as the current logging unfortunately only shows the requests on your side.

kamzata

do the failures occur a specific amount of time? (as that may indicate a specific timeout)

No, time varies but but it stops at the same size for the same user. They are able to download the file only providing them the direct Dropbox share link.

are they using a particular browser?

Chrome or Firefox

are they in a particular region or using a particular ISP?

No, they are from all over the world.

are they using any firewall, proxy, VPN, etc.?

They don't even know what they are.

Greg-DB

Thanks for following up and sharing that. Unfortunately it's not clear why that may be happening for those users, so I suggest raising this with support so they can investigate.