While this is probably security related, disabling compression is actually a good practice for clients which make a large number of SSL requests (like a browser

While this is probably security related, disabling compression is actually a good practice for clients which make a large number of SSL requests (like a browser). OpenSSL allocates alot of memory per connection for compression/decompression. See http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/04/05/openssl-memory-use/ http://journal.paul.querna.org/articles/2011/04/05/openssl-m... for a great discussion of why SSL_OP_NO_COMPRESSION might make sense for you. Even if you don't have direct access to the library code creating SSL objects, there are still some tricks with ctypes, ffi, dlopen that have the same effect.