Thundersnatch's Journal: Slashdot's servers misconfigured?

It appears that Slashdot's server admins have mis-configured HTTP compression, resulting in massive bandwidth waste.

Using a HTTP debugging proxy, the logged-in user front page comes in as an 85 KB compressed download. That seemed kind of large to me, so I did some investigation. The same page, uncompressed, is actually 200 bytes smaller. So, in effect, there is no compression at all. When compressewd with sane settings (gzip -6), the same HTML page is just 20KB.

Slashdot is effectively quadrupling their bandwidth bill because of this mis-configuration. I do not believe there are any transparent proxies in front of me causing this behavior.

Can anyone else confirm?

Apache setting?

[Thundersnatch]

I suspect that Apache's DeflateCompressionLevel is set to 0 or 1. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_deflate.html [apache.org]