Webmaster forum - Incomplete Requests in Traffic Analysis

Author

Incomplete Requests in Traffic Analysis

Henry

2006-09-24, 6:59 pm

Hi there,

Just wondering, I am seeing a high number of incomplete requests showing
in my log analysis reports especially against PDF files.

eg for a large pdf file,(4 meg), I am seeing

1500 hits with 1150 incomplete requests.

This discrepanct is common across most of the pdf files on our site.

Can someone explain this?

The document has just been released to our clients and it is something
they need to read so I'm reasonably sure they will download and/or save
the file.

Thanks in advance
Henry

Mark Goodge

2006-09-24, 6:59 pm

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:56:47 +0930, Henry put finger to keyboard and
typed:

>Hi there,
>
>Just wondering, I am seeing a high number of incomplete requests showing
>in my log analysis reports especially against PDF files.
>
>eg for a large pdf file,(4 meg), I am seeing
>
>1500 hits with 1150 incomplete requests.
>
>This discrepanct is common across most of the pdf files on our site.
>
>Can someone explain this?
>
>The document has just been released to our clients and it is something
>they need to read so I'm reasonably sure they will download and/or save
>the file.

The sinple answer is that PDF files are big, and people are more
likely to hit the stop or back button if they don't see something
appear on their screens pretty quickly. Also, no browser is
particularly good at handling embedded PDF within a browser window,
particularly if they're large files - it's almost always better to
download them first and then open them directly into Acrobat Reader.

If your files are that large, then you need to make sure that you tell
people the filesize before they click on the link so that they are
aware that it might take some time to load. Otherwise, they might just
think it's a faulty file and give up. And it's also a good idea to
have a nore on the page suggesting that people download them first
(right-click and "save target as" on a Windows machine) before opening
them rather than just clicking on the link to open them in a browser.
You might also want to offer them the PDFs included in a zip file, so
that one click will download them and they can then do what they want
with them afterwards.

Mark
--
Please help a cat in need: http://www.goodge.co.uk/cat/

Andy Dingley

2006-09-24, 6:59 pm

Henry wrote:

> Just wondering, I am seeing a high number of incomplete requests showing
> in my log analysis reports especially against PDF files.
> eg for a large pdf file,(4 meg), I am seeing

Is this really any surprise?

Most people go to a web site expecting snappy instant results, or at
least progressive rendering of things as they arrive. HTML gives this,
PDF doesn't. Hit people with a 4M download (especially in Oz, where I
understand rural bandwidth is still thin) and many of them will simply
give up, or decide to try later when they're not busy.

Ditch PDF in favour of HTML if you can. (I accept this isn't always
practical)

Show useful HTML abstracts of the content before they have to commit to
downloading it.

Give good indications of size and expected delivery times before they
commit to downloading it. Big is bad, but unexpectedly big is always
worse.

Brian Wakem

2006-09-24, 6:59 pm

Mark Goodge wrote:

> On Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:56:47 +0930, Henry put finger to keyboard and
> typed:
>
>
> The sinple answer is that PDF files are big, and people are more
> likely to hit the stop or back button if they don't see something
> appear on their screens pretty quickly. Also, no browser is
> particularly good at handling embedded PDF within a browser window,
> particularly if they're large files

Konqueror does an excellent job of embedding PDFs of any size with Kpdf.

--
Brian Wakem
Email: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/b.wakem/myemail.png