Since we announced HTTP Compression across all web servers the response has been great. Many of you are extremely pleased with the bandwidth savings and speed improvements this has brought.
However we have had some reports that AOL users may experience “502 Server Congestion” errors when accessing sites. The servers are in no way congested so this was intriguing me as to what could cause this. After numerous attempts I managed to speak to someone at AOL. While they seemed not very knowledgeable about what I was asking they did give me a hint as to what the problem could be when discussing image compression. Since the problems only started to occur since enabling HTTP compression this became the obvious possible cause.
After some more digging I was able to find information about the AOL browser and user-agent. From this I added a rule to the HTTP compression engine to send uncompressed content any browser identifying itself as an AOL user-agent. This was only done this morning so fingers crossed this should resolve the problem for users using AOL.
April 5th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
Well unfortunately it seems like this was a further waste of time. Even after completely disabling HTTP compression AOL users are still reporting the 502 error messages.
This is extremely difficult for us to troubleshoot given we do not have an AOL account and AOL do not want to talk to “non-members”.
April 6th, 2006 at 8:45 am
[…] Further to my post about AOL 502 Errors it seems this issue may have resolved itself. I have been told that customers are now able to access sites via the AOL browser. Since nothing has been changed between yesterday and today this indicates it is a problem with AOL and not us. […]