.net - BITS Client Fails To Specify HTTP Range Header

Our system is designed to deploy to regions with unreliable and/or insufficient network connections. We build our own fault tolerating data replication services that uses BITS.

Due to some security and maintenance requirements, we implemented our own ASP.NET file download service on the server side, instead of just letting IIS serving up the files. When BITS client makes an HTTP download request with the specified range of the file, our ASP.NET page pulls the demanded file segment into memory and serve that up as the HTTP response. That is the theory. ;) This theory fails in artificial lab scenarios but I would not let the system deploy in real life scenarios unless we can overcome that.

Lab scenario: I have BITS client and the IIS on the same developer machine, so practically I have enormous network "bandwidth" and BITS is intelligent enough to detect that. As BITS client discovers the unlimited bandwidth, it gets more and more "greedy". At each HTTP request, BITS wants to grasp greater and greater file ranges (we are talking about downloading CD iso files, videos), demanding 20-40MB inside a single HTTP request, a size that I am not comfortable to pull into memory on the server side as one go. I can overcome that simply by giving less than demanded. It is OK.

However, BITS gets really "confident" and "arrogant" demanding files WITHOUT specifying the download range, i.e., it wants the entire file in a single request, and this is where things go wrong. I do not know how to answer that response in the case of a 600MB file. If I just provide the starting 1MB range of the file, BITS client keeps sending HTTP requests for the same file without download range to continue, it hammers its point that it wants the entire file in one go. Since I am reluctant to provide the entire file, BITS gives up after several trials and reports error.