On Thu, Nov 02, 2006 at 10:48:36PM -0800, David Cuthbert wrote: > Most large sites don't use keep alive. It ties up a worker thread > waiting for another request to come from your home PC, whose link is > this slow megabit-plus high-latency straw compared to our OC-48 firehose > which is 3-4 hops from MAE East.
Only if you use a broken web server. With a proper O(1) event notification mechanism and async web servers, keep-alive is a huge win, if you don't have a single server load high enough to run out of file descriptors. Keep in mind that especially the high latency links are gaining most by using keep-alive as TCP needs start to stabilise near the bandwidth delay product -- and most end users have lots of both facors. Joerg
