Apache HTTP Server Version 1.3

You are looking at the documentation for the 1.3 version of the Apache HTTP Server, which is no longer maintained, and has been declared "end of life". If you are in fact still using the 1.3 version, please consider upgrading. The current version of the server is 2.4.

Apache Keep-Alive Support

What is Keep-Alive?

The Keep-Alive extension to HTTP, as defined by the HTTP/1.1 draft, allows persistent connections. These long-lived HTTP sessions allow multiple requests to be send over the same TCP connection, and in some cases have been shown to result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with lots of images.

Enabling Keep-Alive Support

Apache 1.1 comes with Keep-Alive support on by default, however there are some directives you can use to modify Apache's behavior:

Note: Apache 1.2 uses a different syntax for the KeepAlive directive.

KeepAlive

Syntax: KeepAlive max-requests
Default:

KeepAlive
    5

Context: server config
Status: Core

This directive enables Keep-Alive support. Set max-requests to the maximum number of requests you want Apache to entertain per connection. A limit is imposed to prevent a client from hogging your server resources. Set this to 0 to disable support.

KeepAliveTimeout

Syntax: KeepAliveTimeout seconds
Default:

KeepAliveTimeout
    15

Context: server config
Status: Core

The number of seconds Apache will wait for a subsequent request before closing the connection. Once a request has been received, the timeout value specified by the Timeout directive applies.

When Keep-Alive Is Used

In order for Keep-Alive support to be used, first the browser must support it. Many current browsers, including Netscape Navigator 2.0, and Spyglass Mosaic-based browsers (including Microsoft Internet Explorer) do. Note, however, that some Windows 95-based browsers misbehave with Keep-Alive-supporting servers; they may occasionally hang on a connect. This has been observed with several Windows browsers, and occurs when connecting to any Keep-Alive server, not just Apache. Netscape 3.0b5 and later versions are known to work around this problem.

However, Keep-Alive support only is active with files where the length is known beforehand. This means that most CGI scripts, server-side included files and directory listings will not use the Keep-Alive protocol. While this should be completely transparent to the end user, it is something the web-master may want to keep in mind.

Apache HTTP Server