We are running a marketplace on ColdFusion8 and IIS with a widely geographically distributed user base and have been receiving complaints of issues with some HTTP uploads. Most of the complaints are coming from geographically distant locations from our main datacenter on the US east coast.

I've attempted to upload the same 70MB file from a US West coast test server to both our main site and a backup running the same code on a different network route and I saw the same issues fairly consistently in both places, so I've ruled out the code, route, and internal network errors. I've also tested uploads using both the native cf upload tag and a third party tool called SaFileUp. I saw the same issues with both upload tools, so I also don't think this is necessarily a ColdFusion problem. I don't have any problems uploading the test file from the East coast to other east coast servers, so I'm beginning to think that the distance between our users and our equipment is a factor.

I've also found that smaller files are more likely to succeed than large ones (< 10MB)

I tried the test upload with both IE and FF and did notice a difference in the way that the browsers seemed to handle packet errors. IE seemed to have a tough time continuing an upload after dropped / bad packets, whereas FF seemed to have the ability to gracefully resume an upload after experiencing packet problems.

1. Has anyone experienced similar issues?

2. Is there anything we can do on our side to make uploads more forgiving to packet loss or resumable after an error? A different upload tool etc…

3. Do we need upload servers in more than one location to shorten the network routes between clients and servers?

4. Does anyone think that switching uploads to SSL will help (no layer7 packet sniffing may lead to a smoother upload).

Thanks.