Apache, Configuring
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Apache 2 Configuration
If you've got a busy webserver, you'll soon find yourself looking at tweaking the Apache configuration to get more. As it is, most Apache installs are configured for testing / development vs production use.
KeepAlives
The KeepAlives directive is enabled by default; to quote from the Apache documentation:
The Keep-Alive extension to HTTP/1.0 and the persistent connection feature of HTTP/1.1 provide long-lived HTTP sessions which allow multiple requests to be sent over the same TCP connection. In some cases this has been shown to result in an almost 50% speedup in latency times for HTML documents with many images.
Which is a good thing, if you want fast pages and have a strong server to handle it. If you're more concerned with availability than speed, or are running Apache on a less-than-stellar machine, you may get better performance (cpu/processor-wise, at least,) by turning KeepAlives off:
Default:
KeepAlives On
Tweaked:
KeepAlives Off