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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

NAT (Network Address Translation)
A method of mapping private IP addresses to public IP addresses, allowing multiple devices to share a single public IP.
TCP/IP
The fundamental communication protocol suite of the internet that defines how data is packaged, addressed, transmitted, and received.
Bandwidth
The maximum rate of data transfer across a network connection, measured in bits per second.
DNS (Domain Name System)
A hierarchical naming system that translates human-readable domain names into IP addresses.
HTTPS Everywhere
The practice of securing all web traffic with TLS encryption, ensuring data integrity and privacy between browsers and servers.
QoS (Quality of Service)
A set of techniques for managing network traffic to prioritize certain types of data and ensure performance for critical applications.
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