Keep-Alive Notes

>From Roy's original notes:

 > ...  Another possibility is
 > 
 >    Keep-Alive: state="Accept,Accept-Language,..."
 > 
 > for indicating which header fields can be or have been stored as a
 > persistent request state.  This would allow the server to decide whether
 > or not to be stateless in its request handling, and the amount of state
 > it is willing/able to retain, while at the same time allowing each
 > request to override the saved state with or without changing what is saved.
 > 

The question that occurs to me is whether this is worth the additional
complexity in terms of bandwidth savings.  I can't see any reason
other than bandwidth savings in the chain of requests that such a
construct would be wanted. (Is there one?).  If this is right, then it
seems unlikely to produce enough savings to be worth the trouble.
This seems especially true if proxies are going to be multiplexing
requests from multiple clients onto a single connection to an 
"upstream" server. It's certainly possible to make this work, but does it
buy enough to be worth the trouble?

	--------------------

What I would like to know about all this is whether this version of
"connection: keep-alive" will support pipelined requests.  I didn't
notice anything in Roy's notes that would *prevent* it.  What is
necessary to make sure that it would work?

Shel Kaphan
sjk@amazon.com

Received on Wednesday, 18 October 1995 09:36:43 UTC