Since about 2 months (not sure when it started) I had some download issues with files bigger then 200 MB. It was at least during Firefox 6 and 7 that I had this issue, not sure about 5.
After a lot of googling into this issue I couldn’t find anything related to it.
So here are a couple of the symptoms:
- ANY downloads bigger then 262 MB stops after 262.142KB every single time
- This message pops up(with your own folder of course):
- D:\Downloads\ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso could not be saved, because the source file could not be read.
Try again later, or contact the server administrator. - Massive memory consumption (seems to be a memory leak) I was using well over 1GB of memory in Firefox
This is on Windows 7 (64bit). I don’t know if this happens on other versions as well or not, or even if it happens on Linux.
UPDATE: I just tested it on Ubuntu and nothing happened. memory use went up while downloading but it didn’t hang and memory use stopped at about 800 MB (still FF6) so thats nothing to worry about. So far it seems to be a windows only issue.
As I said I looked into this issue for quite some time, reset all my download options and locations: Didn’t help. I tried to save the download on an other hard drive: Didn’t help.
Finally I decided to restart Firefox in safe mode.. and Tadaaa it work, therefor is MUST be a add-on causing this. I suspected it to be Firebug, because they had a very similar issue before, but this was fixed.. I found firebug to be disabled due to not compatible with Firefox 7, so it couldn’t be that. Then I noticed that YSlow was still active, this is a plug-in that integrates INTO firebug. I figured, well lets just try that one and start eliminating them one by one. I disabled it, restarted Firefox and restarted the download, and behold! it worked!
So the solution:
Disable the Yslow (3.0.4) add-on if your having trouble downloading files bigger then 262 MB.
Hope this helps some people, took me long enough to figure out.