diff --git a/geonames/challenges/default.json b/geonames/challenges/default.json
index b51ccefc..90f6e074 100644
--- a/geonames/challenges/default.json
+++ b/geonames/challenges/default.json
@@ -77,13 +77,13 @@
           "operation": "term",
           "warmup-iterations": 500,
           "iterations": 1000,
-          "target-throughput": 200
+          "target-throughput": 150
         },
         {
           "operation": "phrase",
           "warmup-iterations": 500,
           "iterations": 1000,
-          "target-throughput": 200
+          "target-throughput": 150
         },
         {
           "operation": "country_agg_uncached",
diff --git a/pmc/operations/default.json b/pmc/operations/default.json
index 24cae9da..dfe684f3 100644
--- a/pmc/operations/default.json
+++ b/pmc/operations/default.json
@@ -81,6 +81,8 @@
       "operation-type": "search",
       "pages": 25,
       "results-per-page": 100,
+      "#COMMENT": "Large responses cause overhead on the client when decompressing the response. Disable to avoid the overhead",
+      "response-compression-enabled": false,
       "body": {
         "query": {
           "match_all": {}