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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

QoS (Quality of Service)
A set of techniques for managing network traffic to prioritize certain types of data and ensure performance for critical applications.
Subnet
A logical division of an IP network into smaller segments to improve performance, security, and management.
Network Packet
A formatted unit of data carried over a network, containing headers with routing information and a payload with the actual data.
Bandwidth
The maximum rate of data transfer across a network connection, measured in bits per second.
SSL/TLS Certificate
A digital certificate that authenticates a website identity and enables encrypted HTTPS connections.
HTTPS Everywhere
The practice of securing all web traffic with TLS encryption, ensuring data integrity and privacy between browsers and servers.
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