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Networking Beginner

What is HTTP Keep-Alive?

An HTTP mechanism that reuses a single TCP connection for multiple requests, reducing the overhead of establishing new connections.

HTTP Keep-Alive (persistent connections) allows multiple HTTP requests and responses to share a single TCP connection, eliminating the overhead of TCP handshakes and TLS negotiations for each request. In HTTP/1.1, connections are keep-alive by default (Connection: keep-alive header). Servers configure maximum requests per connection and idle timeout. Keep-alive significantly improves page load times for sites with many resources (images, CSS, JS files) — each resource does not require a new connection. HTTP/2 extends this further with multiplexing (multiple concurrent requests on one connection). Web servers like Nginx configure keepalive_timeout and keepalive_requests directives.

Related Terms

DNS Record Types
Different types of DNS entries that map domain names to various information like IP addresses, mail servers, and verification strings.
HTTP/HTTPS
The protocol used for transferring web pages and data between browsers and servers, with HTTPS adding encryption.
VPN (Virtual Private Network)
A technology that creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server, securing internet traffic.
QoS (Quality of Service)
A set of techniques for managing network traffic to prioritize certain types of data and ensure performance for critical applications.
DHCP
A protocol that automatically assigns IP addresses and network configuration to devices on a network.
IPv6
The latest version of the Internet Protocol with 128-bit addresses, designed to replace IPv4 and solve address exhaustion.
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