What is the connection keep-alive feature of HTTP 1.1?

Question Posted / guest

2 Answers
10797 Views
I also Faced
E-Mail Answers

Answers were Sorted based on User's Feedback

What is the connection keep-alive feature of HTTP 1.1?..

Answer / guest

HTTP 1.1's connection keep-alive feature allows the TCP
connection between a browser and a Web server to remain open
throughout multiple HTTP requests and responses. This
significantly improves the overall performance of
browser-server communication.

Is This Answer Correct ?

10 Yes

0 No

What is the connection keep-alive feature of HTTP 1.1?..

Answer / rajani nagandla

Http operates on what is called a request-response
paradigm. This means that a _client_ generates a request
for information, and passes it to the server, which answers
it. In the original implementation of HTTP, each request
created a new socket connection to the server, sent the
request, then read from that connection to get the response.

This approach had one big advantage - it was simple. Simple
to describe, simple to understand, and simple to code. It
also had one big disadvantage - it was slow. So, keep-alive
connections were invented for HTTP.

HTTP/1.0
Under HTTP 1.0, there is no official specification for how
keepalive operates. It was, in essence, tacked on to an
existing protocol. If the browser supports keep-alive, it
adds an additional header to the request:

Connection: Keep-Alive

Then, when the server receives this request and generates a
response, it also adds a header to the response:

Connection: Keep-Alive

Following this, the connection is NOT dropped, but is
instead kept open. When the client sends another request,
it uses the same connection. This will continue until
either the client or the server decides that the
conversation is over, and one of them drops the connection.

HTTP/1.1
Under HTTP 1.1, the official keepalive method is different.
All connections are kept alive, unless stated otherwise
with the following header:

Connection: close

The Connection: Keep-Alive header no longer has any meaning
because of this.

Additionally, an optional Keep-Alive: header is described,
but is so underspecified as to be meaningless. Avoid it.