This article explains how to use keep-alive connections to improve performance in Apache.
How to enable keep-alive connections
Keep-alive connections handle many HTTP requests and responses over a single TCP connection. Keep-alive connections allow clients and servers to interact more efficiently and use less resources by not starting a new TCP connection every time a browser sends a request.
Many performance testing sites, such as GTMetrix, check to see if a site's keep-alive connections are enabled. If they are disabled, your site performance score suffers.
If keep-alive conections are disabled for your site, you can easily enable them. To do this, follow these steps:
- Edit or create an .htaccess file in your site's document root directory.
- Copy the following lines and paste them into the .htaccess file:
<IfModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </IfModule> -
Save your changes to the .htaccess file. Keep-alive connections are now enabled.
