Reduced network congestion – Reducing the number of TCP connections between your servers and clients can lead to a drop in network congestion.Network resource conservation – It’s less taxing on network resources to use a single connection per client.Using the keep-alive header means not having to constantly perform this process. A persistent connection also reduces the number of TCP and SSL/TLS connection requests, leading to a drop in round trip time (RTT).Įstablishing a TCP connection first requires a three-way handshake – a mutual exchange of SYN and ACK packets between a client and server before data can be transmitted. The HTTP keep-alive header maintains a connection between a client and your server, reducing the time needed to serve files. This figure should be set according to how frequently your website is visited, i.e., sites with high traffic volumes will want to have a large timeout value to limit the number of TCP connection requests. KeepAliveTimeout – This directive sets the time that a server should wait for user requests before a new TCP connection needs to be established.When determining this figure, it’s important to take into account the number of files on your website that a user might want to access. MaxKeepAliveRequests – This directive sets the maximum number of requests for every keep-alive connection.Within the ‘Connection keep-alive’ header, the following two directives can affect its functionality. In the event that keep-alive is not enabled on your server, it can be turned on by adding the following code to your. Keep-alive also reduces both CPU and memory usage on your server. images, Javascript, and CSS stylesheets), a process that can lead to high page load times.Įnabling the keep-alive header allows you to serve all web page resources over a single connection. When someone visits your site, their browser needs to create new connections to request each of the files that make up your web pages (e.g.

HTTP keep-alive, a.k.a., HTTP persistent connection, is an instruction that allows a single TCP connection to remain open for multiple HTTP requests/responses.īy default, HTTP connections close after each request.

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