Importance of HTTP connection keep-alive (was: Is this for real?)

[Michael_google gmail_Gersten]

> "Michael_google gmail_Gersten" <keybounce at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > (Yea, getting keep-alive to work will help a lot with web browsing,
>
> Is this an assumption or did you just forget to show
> your benchmarks to back this claim up?

This was mentioned on this list a while back; that a proper TCP
implementation needs to determine the speed / window size / other
properties of a TCP connection, so that the actual speed is slower
when the TCP connection is first opened. So, keep alive eliminates the
overhead of many connections, as well as the many per-connection
startup slowdown.

Then, there's the whole "Keep-alive was added to the HTTP standard to
speed it up" issue.

I figure if the standard committee will say "We need X to speed it
up", then they have benchmarks to back that claim up.