206 Partial Content
206 Partial Content is used for range requests. It’s possible for a
HTTP client to request only portions of a resource using range requests.
Examples of this might include a large log resource for which a client only wants the last n bytes. Or maybe a video and the client doesn’t want to buffer more data than needed, or maybe a user is seeking through the video by fast-forwarding.
If a client issued a range request, and the server is able to handle this
feature, it can indicate to the client that it’s sending back only certain
ranges with the 206 Partial Content status, and Content-Range headers.
The following request asks the server for a portion of a video:
GET /video.mp4 HTTP/1.1
Range: bytes=1048576-2097152
A server supporting this could respond as follows:
HTTP/1.1 206 Partial Content
Content-Range: bytes 1048576-2097152/3145728
Content-Type: video/mp4
...
If a server doesn’t support Range requests, it will just return a 200 OK
and send back the entire video. A client will know that the server didn’t
support it via this status code and the omission of the Content-Range header.
References
- RFC7233 - (HTTP/1.1): Range Requests