HTML Error Code 206

... plain English explanation

[austtr]

One of my sites regularly reports a lot of "206 Partial Content" in the stats report.

I've read the W3 words on this and can't decipher it. Can anyone provide a simple English explanation ... and... does a 206 indicate there is an underlying problem that needs to be addressed?

[Dijkgraaf]

Basically your web site got a request that said, give me only part of something and your web server said, OK, here is the bit you asked for.
So the only time that your web server will issue a 206, is when the client app make such a request.
To fully know what is happing you will need to actually look at the underlying log files, and see what file is being requested, and what User Agent is doing the requesting.
If you can get those details then maybe we can shed more light on the situation.

[JAB Creations]

206 = partial content

I get a lot of code 206s...

For example if you download a 40 mb video and then cancel it in to 20mbs of the download.

If you have a lot of large files then you'll likely have a high rate of 206s.

Usually this means the user accidentally opened your site.

~OR~

This could also mean the user loaded something while surfing your site but then decided they weren't interested.