Keep-Alive

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Persistent TCP connections that remain open for multiple request-response exchanges, avoiding the overhead of repeated handshakes and slow start. HTTP/1.1 uses keep-alive by default. Connection pooling reuses established connections across requests. Idle connections are periodically probed to detect failures.

Key Properties

• Persistent Connections
• Connection Pooling
• Idle Timeout

Related

• Three-Way Handshake (overhead that keep-alive avoids)
• HTTP 1.1 (keep-alive is default in HTTP/1.1)

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networking tcp performance