Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Should Keepalive be enabled in config.tcl?

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Posted by Jonathan Ellis on
Seems to me that in high-volume sites letting clients hold onto their connections when they're not actually requesting a page (http keepalive) is undersireable.  I always set it to zero.
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Jonathan, I don't know much about HTTP keepalive but I strongly suspect your conclusion is flawed, as the keepalive feature of HTTP is specifically intended to reduce server load, not increase it.

By your reasoning, I imagine the thing to do would probably be to enable HTTP keepalive, but set keepalivetimeout to a relatively short time, maybe 4 seconds. That way if the client really does have another HTTP request (for images, style sheets, etc.) to make immediately, it can pipe-line it through the same already open, kept-alive TCP/IP connection, but the connection will go away soon if the client is idle.