If you are using the procedures outlined in this article to force sending a file to a user, you may find that the "Content-Length" header is not being sent on some servers.
The reason this occurs is because some servers are setup by default to enable gzip compression, which sends an additional header for such operations. This additional header is "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" which essentially overrides the "Content-Length" header and forces a chunked download. Of course, this is not required if you are using the intelligent versions of readfile in this article.
A missing Content-Length header implies the following:
1) Your browser will not show a progress bar on downloads because it doesn't know their length
2) If you output anything (e.g. white space) after the readfile function (by mistake), the browser will add that to the end of the download, resulting in corrupt data.
The easiest way to disable this behaviour is with the following .htaccess directive.
SetEnv no-gzip dont-vary
