- From: Dave Kristol <dmk@allegra.att.com>
- Date: Thu, 18 Apr 96 16:35:11 EDT
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
The editorial group that is working on the HTTP/1.1 draft is strongly interested in making persistent connections the default behavior for HTTP/1.1 agents. The goal is to encourage widespread use of persistent connections as quickly as possible. IF YOU DISAGREE, please address your objections to the http-wg mailing list as quickly as possible. I review the proposal below. Dave Kristol ============= The presence of an HTTP/1.1 protocol version in the request and response is enough to tell a) a server that the client expects to hold the connection open b) a client that the server will try to hold the connection open. If all the proxies between a user agent and an origin server understand HTTP/1.1, the entire connection can be held open. An HTTP/1.1 agent that does *not* want to keep a connection open sends a Connection: 1 [that's a change: digit one, meaning "just one connection"] request or response header. So the rules would be: (HTTP/1.1) Server: For an HTTP/1.1 request, keep the connection open, unless there's a Connection: 1 header. If the server chooses to close the connection, it should send a Connection: 1 response header. For an HTTP/1.0 request, a server could implement the existing, sometimes-honored Connection: keepalive convention. Client: An HTTP/1.0 client would, of course, do what it does now, which may include using the existing Connection: keepalive convention. An HTTP/1.1 client expects a connection to remain open, but would decide to keep it open based on whether the response from a server contains a Connection: 1 header. If the client doesn't want a connection to remain open, it should send a Connection: 1 request header. If the HTTP/1.1 client receives an HTTP/1.0 response, it expects the connection to close, unless it receives a Connection: keepalive response and it honors that convention. Superficially this proposal may seem complex. However, for the default case HTTP/1.1 agents need send no extra headers to get/maintain the preferred kept-alive connection behavior. While Connection: 1 can be used to advise, it isn't essential to the protocol's functioning correctly.
Received on Thursday, 18 April 1996 13:46:52 UTC