Rich Bowen wrote:
While the 2.2 config files are somewhat in flux, I thought I'd bring up
the topic of KeepAliveTimeout. The default config files have this set to
15 seconds. As far as I remember, it is set that way due to some
possibly-scientific survey that said that "average" web users click ever
15 seconds. Even assuming that that was true at some point, it seems to
me that the main reason for keepalive is for the files (images, css)
associated with a single page, not for retaining a connection between
pages. In that case, I would think that 2, or perhaps 3 seconds, would
be more than sufficient.
On the more practical non-gut-feeling side, I've found consistently that
changing KeepAliveTimeout from 15 to 3 immediately, and drastically,
reduces server load on busy servers, where a significant percentage of
the child processes are in Keepalive mode most of the time.
See http://httpd.apache.org/server-status for an example. Note that
(most of the time) most of the processes are in K. I'm willing to bet
that reducing KeepAliveTimeout to 2 or 3 will drop the number of child
processes significantly, reduce overall server load, and improve server
performance under peak traffic.
Thoughts?
--Rich
Joshua picked the important nits.. I am generally +1 on setting default KA
timeout from 15 to 5.
Bill
