Accept-Ranges Byte Serving — Range Request and Partial Content Download Errors

Overview

Fix HTTP range request errors including 416 Range Not Satisfiable, partial content download failures, and video/audio streaming seeking issues.

Key Details

• Accept-Ranges: bytes indicates the server supports partial content downloads via Range requests
• Clients use Range: bytes=0-1023 to request specific byte ranges of a resource
• Server responds with 206 Partial Content and Content-Range header for successful range requests
• Video and audio streaming relies on range requests for seeking within media files
• 416 Range Not Satisfiable is returned when the requested range is outside the content bounds

Common Causes

• Server not supporting range requests — missing Accept-Ranges header
• CDN stripping Range headers or not forwarding partial content responses
• Range request specifying bytes beyond the end of the file
• Dynamic content that cannot be served in byte ranges due to unknown content length

Steps

1. 1Add Accept-Ranges: bytes header to responses for static files, media, and large downloads
2. 2Handle Range header in your application: parse the byte range and return 206 with Content-Range header
3. 3Return 416 Range Not Satisfiable with Content-Range: bytes */total-size for invalid ranges
4. 4Configure your CDN to forward Range headers and cache partial content responses
5. 5Test range requests: 'curl -r 0-1023 -o partial.dat https://your-server.com/largefile.zip'

Tags

More in 2xx Success

Frequently Asked Questions