Hi, we have received a bug report [1] that a DoS is possible with mod_deflate since it does not stop to compress large files even after the network connection has been closed. This allows to use large amounts of CPU if there is a largish (>10 MB) file available that has mod_deflate enabled. An exploit is as easy as for a in $(seq 1 100) ; do curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" -is http://url.to/large/file.txt | head -1 ; done Franois Guerraz, the bug submitter, also suggested a patch: --- mod_deflate.c 2008-01-04 15:23:50.000000000 +0100 +++ mod_deflate.c.new 2009-06-26 16:50:36.000000000 +0200 @@ -691,6 +691,10 @@ continue; } + if (r->connection->aborted) { + return APR_ECONNABORTED; + } + /* read */ apr_bucket_read(e, &data, &len, APR_BLOCK_READ); This greatly reduces the problem. But even with it, quite a bit of data is compressed (maybe determined by APR_MMAP_LIMIT == 4MB?). Cheers, Stefan [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=534712