🎁 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

Latency
The time delay between sending a request and receiving a response, measured in milliseconds.
Load Balancer
A device or software that distributes network traffic across multiple servers to ensure reliability and performance.
VPN (Virtual Private Network)
A technology that creates an encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server, securing internet traffic.
SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)
A protocol for monitoring and managing network devices like routers, switches, servers, and printers remotely.
SSL/TLS Certificate
A digital certificate that authenticates a website identity and enables encrypted HTTPS connections.
TCP/IP
The fundamental communication protocol suite of the internet that defines how data is packaged, addressed, transmitted, and received.
 View All Networking Terms →