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Maybe not at the transport or protocol level, but it wouldn't be too hard to DoS an application server that handles compressed data, such as images.

Make a billion-pixel PNG image that compresses very well, upload several copies simultaneously to a LAMP server running on an average Linode, and watch it run out of memory while trying to create thumbnails with GD.



PHP usually has a pretty reasonable memory limit set, so it would puke on itself pretty quickly.

But I don't think you'd bring the site down.


Fair enough, but I've been on Linode's forums long enough to have seen dozens of people running 50 PHP processes with 128MB memory limit each, on a 1GB server shared with MySQL and a bunch of other crap. (It seems that 128MB is the new "reasonable memory limit" these days, since that's how much RAM it takes for PHP to handle photos from 8-to-12-megapixel cameras and smartphones.)




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