This article describes how to use keep-alive connections in Apache to help improve performance.
Keep-alive connections use a single TCP connection to handle multiple HTTP requests and responses. Instead of opening a new TCP connection every time a brower sends a request, keep-alive connections enable clients and servers to communicate more efficiently and use fewer resources.
Many performance testing sites, such as GTMetrix, check if keep-alive connections are enabled for a site. If they are disabled, you receive a lower site performance score.
If keep-alive conections are disabled for your site, you can easily enable them. To do this, follow these steps:
<IfModule mod_headers.c> Header set Connection keep-alive </IfModule>
Save your changes to the .htaccess file. Keep-alive connections are now enabled.
To verify that keep-alive connections are enabled, you can examine the raw HTTP headers sent between the browser and web server. To do this, use a browser plugin that displays the raw headers such as Live HTTP headers for Mozilla Firefox, or the Developer Tools feature in Google Chrome. When keep-alive connections are enabled, Apache adds the following line to the HTTP response header:
Connection: Keep-Alive
For more information about keep-alive connections, please visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection.