I didn't notice that Squid does a nice thing , all things considered .. When the protocol is sent as HTTP 1.1 to the Squid cache, it rewrites the request as HTTP 1.0 (changing the SERVER_PROTOCOL header) , but sticks the origin client protocol version into the "Via" header. so for a snippet of our code, i can inspect the via header, and if the client has come in via 1.1 I can have the server gzip the data and send it on.. This has to be done in secondary code, as obviously apache and everything else is going to reply with the originating http version and with squid, it's 1.0 .. i was not aware of this and didn't catch it until today. -Tory