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  • #2080938

    Serving 30-50MB .pdf files thru http

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    by roderic ·

    We have a corporate Intranet that our Marketing department is publishing acrobat files on. These files (books really) are very large – up to 50MBs. Hence, the end-user opens his/her browser (MS Internet Explorer) and uses http to get at these files. As you can imagine – they take a very long time to load. We believe it is the http protocal that is slowing things down – not our bandwidth – which is up to T1.

    Marketing would like to continue to use Acrobat. They like the searching capabilities in the tool. We have looked at several ways of delivering this better, i.e. CD ROM, breaking up the files into smaller chunks, putting the files on a file server (as opposed to a web server) and requiring the user to download it, etc… For various reasons, these are all distasteful solutions.

    Our environment is basically Microsoft-centric (Windows 95 – 2000, NT Servers, etc.).

    How can we deliver these files to our users in a faster manner?

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    • #3787278

      No good solutions…

      by chad ·

      In reply to Serving 30-50MB .pdf files thru http

      Its going to be hard to compress the content much without losing information, charts, graphs, etc. that they want to give out. This is something that you may wish to educate the marketing dept. about, having them break the content into “chapters” or the like. Also, what kind of link is on the other side? Do they have slow links? And a T1 isn’t all that fast when you’ve got a few users downloading a 30mb document.

      • #3787259

        FTP

        by roderic ·

        In reply to No good solutions…

        Oh, I agree. Marketing doesn’t want to break up the file. I have proposed just doing FTP links so that the file can be downloaded from a FILE server first – and then speds will be quicker when working with the document. Here, our problem (as IT) isn’t education – it’s politics. We’re prepared to say, “This is what we will do and support.” But, before we put our foot down, we’re trying to see if we can satisfy their desire to have it remain as it is – but provide better performance.

    • #3742782

      this might work

      by sutton ojas ·

      In reply to Serving 30-50MB .pdf files thru http

      Have you thought about using a Citrix Solution? That way, it is a server based model and only clicks and keystrokes travel network wise. good luck.

    • #3742642

      HTTP usage of large documents

      by john m. f. kallevik ·

      In reply to Serving 30-50MB .pdf files thru http

      Hello!

      I might be attacking this from the wrong angle, but have you considered sharing these books/documents as Hypertext documents on a server?

      Since you are already using Acrobat, the jump from .pdf to .html does’nt need to be large, and editind tools can easily be adapted to the usage you need. This way the user would never need to download more of the document/book than he is working on, and since all users would be working on the same server, the documents would always be up-to-date,and viewable to all selected users trough a browser.

      Of course, this would mean a large change in the way to work, not to mention that you would have to develop a security routine to ensure that outside users wouldn’t get access to confidential information, but it is a fully implementable soulution, espescially since you have a fast Internet connection.

      Just a thought…

      John M. F. Kallevik
      Inter:Active Designs
      Stavanger, Norway
      —————–
      john.kallevik@post.com
      interactive_it@post.com

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