🎁 New User? Get 20% off your first purchase with code NEWUSER20 · ⚡ Instant download · 🔒 Secure checkout Register Now →
Menu

Categories

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

ARP (Address Resolution Protocol)
A protocol that maps IP addresses to physical MAC addresses on a local network segment.
Subnet
A logical division of an IP network into smaller segments to improve performance, security, and management.
CIDR Notation
A compact method for specifying IP addresses and their associated routing prefix using a slash followed by the prefix length.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
The routing protocol that makes the internet work by exchanging routing information between autonomous systems.
Multicast
A network communication method that sends data to multiple recipients simultaneously without duplicating packets for each recipient.
MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit)
The maximum size of a data packet that can be transmitted over a network without fragmentation.
 View All Networking Terms →