double gzip workarounds?

[Peter Warren]

Given this issue with App Engine (http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/detail?id=2036), it seems that I'm stuck gzipping to store items in memcache, ungzipping them when I pull them out of cache, and then having GAE re-gzip them to deliver them to the client.

I'm having a really, really hard time believing that this is the case. Is there no way for me to store gzipped content in memcache and have it delivered as gzipped content without GAE trying to gzip it again on the way out to the browser?

The objects we're caching are fairly big ~1MB and compress at about 10:1. It's crazy for us to unzip and then rezip the same object when servicing a single web request. At this point I'm thinking of setting up a Varnish cache on AWS to sit in front of our GAE apps just to avoid this. Are there other, better ideas?

Thanks!

Peter