Queries to non-FAST search.asmx 2010 are failing when response size hist 100KB

Queries against search.asmx (not FAST) are failing with ERR_CONNECTION_RESET if the response size is over 100KB. I've never heard of an IIS response size limit, so I'm assuming this is SharePoint failing behind the scenes. Has anyone experienced this before, and do you know how I could adjust this?

First I though it was noise-word related since the failing searches used very common words, but that wasn't it. Then I started experimenting with Fiddler and examining the payloads when I noticed the correlation between response size and failure/success.

The amount of data the queries need to return is fairly large since there are several URLs, in addition to the normal bloat the search.asmx service carries, so we can only get between 45-55 results back. Not good.

I'd rather not write my own server code to make this work properly. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.