What is HTTP keep-alive? What is HTTP request pipelining?

Traditional HTTP uses one TCP connection per request. The client opens the connection and sends the request. The server then sends the response and closes the connection. We can do this manually using netcat (nc), sending a test request to httpbin.org:

$ printf "GET /status/200 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: httpbin.org\r\n\r\n" | nc httpbin.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Server: meinheld/0.6.1
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 21:34:51 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
X-Powered-By: Flask
X-Processed-Time: 0
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 vegur

$

What should we do to make two requests? Traditionally, the client would open two TCP connections. But a new TCP connection is costly; it takes time, network bandwidth, and CPU usage (especially if using TLS). The HTTP “keep-alive” feature allows us to use the same TCP connection for multiple HTTP requests. The header Connection: keep-alive asks the server to keep the TCP connection open after the server has sent its response, so that the client can send further requests on it.

To send another request, the client appends the second request to the first. Similarly, when the server replies with a second response on the same connection, it appends it to the first response. Let’s see this in action:

$ cat <(printf "GET /status/200 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: httpbin.org\r\nConnection: keep-alive\r\n\r\n") \
      <(printf "GET /status/200 HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: httpbin.org\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n") \
  | nc httpbin.org 80
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: keep-alive
Server: meinheld/0.6.1
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 21:51:48 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
X-Powered-By: Flask
X-Processed-Time: 0
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 vegur

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
Server: meinheld/0.6.1
Date: Tue, 27 Mar 2018 21:51:48 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
X-Powered-By: Flask
X-Processed-Time: 0
Content-Length: 0
Via: 1.1 vegur

$

Actually, the Connection: keep-alive header is unnecessary, because it’s the default in HTTP/1.1. Connection: close is the way to explicitly tell the server to close the connection after sending the response.

Because the requests are joined with simple concatenation, we need to be able to determine where one request ends and the next begins. The header section is always terminated by \r\n\r\n. There are a couple of ways to specify the body section length. One is the Content-Length header. Another method to specify the end of the request is to use Content-Encoding: chunked. This is necessary for streaming a request body, where the length is not known in advance.

HTTP keep-alive also allows “pipelining”. Pipelining means sending further requests without waiting for responses. The two requests we sent in the previous example were pipelined. This is possible in HTTP because, in general, sending request n+1 does not require any information from response n.

Tagged #programming, #networking. All content copyright James Fisher 2018. This post is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.