Servlet Response different from IE to Netscape

[David Li]

As David Hibbs suggested, I am posting the following problem here:
Using the HttpServletResponse to send either PDF or xls file to the user. It is working fine in Netscape. However, in IE, the browser will display error on opening the file when traffic is heavy on the site. Why is that?
The server is Websphere.
I am writing direct to the response. Here is code:
ServletOutputStream outStream = null;
try {
if (fileType.equals("xls"))
response.setContentType("application/vnd.ms-excel");
else if (fileType.equals("pdf"))
response.setContentType("application/pdf");
response.setContentLength(report.length);
outStream = response.getOutputStream();
outStream.write(report);
} catch (Exception e4) {
System.out.println("Can not output"+e4.getMessage());
}
finally {
if (outStream != null) {
try {outStream.close();}catch(Exception e5){}
}
}

[Scott Duncan]

What is the error displayed? Also, does this process take a while to perform? In other words, are you doing something other than this like generating the files in question using a specific API or doing some database op that takes a long time to process? Perhaps the browser is timing out when streaming the file. Netscape's timeout setting may be longer than IE's but I am just grasping here.