Maybe, but I wouldn't be so sure that a sites's traffic is skewed one
way or another without first doing some log analysis.
For example, Jonathan, I bet your own www.carnageblender.com site,
being an online game, has a high percentage of repeat multiple hits
from the same user within just a few seconds of each other. In that
case, perhaps AOLserver would be substantially more efficient with
keepalive turned on. But perhaps not, and it's certainly possible
that keepalive could make performance much worse, too... I don't see
any way to know one way or another without empirical testing.
I googled briefly for HTTP keepalive performance tuning info. There
were at least a few relevent
July 2003
and
Nov. 2002
threads on the AOLserver list, but mostly I didn't find anything
useful. Neither rules of thumb, nor details on how to properly do log
analysis and/or load testing to figure out optimum keepalive settings
for a given site, web server, and load.
The (now old and outdated?)
C10k
page barely mentiond HTTP keepalive, but of course has links to all
sorts of detailed server scalability info.
This is currently only of academic interest to me as I don't run a
high traffic site. But some folks here do... So if you're reading
this, please chime in with your HTTP keepalive tuning experience, as
it would be best if we could give OpenACS adopters both a reasonable
default keepalive setting in config.tcl and an explanation of
why or when they might need to change it.
