[ATrpms-users] atrpms.net blocking?

[David Rees]

On 5/7/06, Axel Thimm <Axel.Thimm at atrpms.net> wrote:
> I just say: Ouch
>
> # grep ^KeepAlive /etc/httpd/conf/*.conf
> KeepAlive Off
> KeepAliveTimeout 15
>
> So the fault was on the server ...
>
> My bad, I didn't check the settings and FC4 had this by default off.
> I just turned it on, let's see.

The reason it's off by default is that turning it on will increase the
number of httpd daemons required to sustain the same client load.
Turning on keep alive will now keep a httpd daemon busy doing nothing
for up to 15 seconds if the client supports keep-alive, even if the
client doesn't make any more requests. This most likely will make your
problem worse.

The primary reason to turn on keep alive is that it does improve
performance if the client is making a lot of small requests, but it is
at the expense of the server having to keep track of each keep-alive
connection. In the case of Apache, this means an extra process, but
for squid which is select based no additional process is required
which is why it is able to scale much better than Apache.

-Dave