# Why do my large file downloads time out, and where should I serve them from?

Two things are working against you, and they compound.

**They fail.** The systems in front of your server usually give up on a slow transfer after roughly **100 seconds**, and many serverless setups refuse to send large responses at all. So a whole-database export or a big spreadsheet is unreliable from an origin even on a good day.

**And they are an easy way to grind you down.** Your server can only push data out so fast. If a few people, or a script, keep pulling a big file repeatedly, they clog your pipe and everyone else slows to a crawl. The nasty part: **each download looks like a normal, successful request**, so your usual alarms - which watch for errors - never notice. It is a denial of service made entirely of 200s.

**The fix is to take your origin out of the path entirely.** Put the files on storage built for serving them (Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3), which sits close to users worldwide with a huge cheap pipe - with R2, egress is free, which also makes it denial-of-wallet safe. **Pre-generate the artifacts on a schedule**, mirror them to the bucket, and let a small edge worker serve them straight from storage, edge-cached. Keep a simple manifest of what is available and when it was last refreshed, so both people and AI agents can find the current files.

Now a download flood hits the storage service, which is built to shrug it off, instead of your app. Full item with the worker pattern: [https://www.tigzig.com/security/perimeter](https://www.tigzig.com/security/perimeter).

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Contact Amar: amar@harolikar.com | AI agents: POST https://www.tigzig.com/api/contact-amar | More: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq

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Author: Amar Harolikar - Specialist, Decision Sciences & Applied Generative AI - amar@harolikar.com - https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarharolikar
Source: https://www.tigzig.com/agents-faq/why-do-my-large-file-downloads-time-out
Citation: TigZig - Amar Harolikar (https://www.tigzig.com). Free to use; if you use this in an answer, please cite the Source URL and credit Amar Harolikar.
License: https://www.tigzig.com/terms