Hi, While configuring and testing my new and shiny Apache 2, I noticed that mod_deflate sends a Vary: Content-Encoding header whenever a resource could potentially be compressed, no matter whether it actually is compressed in that particular response. That certainly should work, but in situations where the server's bandwidth is the bottleneck, wouldn't it be a good idea to omit that Vary: header when no compression actually takes place? After all, any user agent should be able to cope with uncompressed content - and when that is what is already "behind the bottleneck", like in some local proxy cache, a Vary: Content-Encoding header on it would cause a request from a user agent supporting compression to cause a reload of the compressed version from the slow server rather than delivering the already locally-available uncompressed version.
When the bottleneck is at the client's end, it's completely different, of course--which is why I'd consider a config option a good idea that would allow the sending of a Vary: Content-Encoding in case of uncompressed content to be disabled. Cya, Florian
