Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive is a networking concept that maintains persistent connections between clients and servers to reduce latency and overhead. It allows multiple HTTP requests and responses to be sent over a single TCP connection, rather than opening a new connection for each request. This improves performance by minimizing connection setup and teardown times, especially for web applications with frequent interactions.
Developers should use Keep-Alive in web development to enhance performance for applications with repeated client-server communications, such as dynamic websites, APIs, or real-time services. It reduces server load and speeds up response times by reusing connections, making it essential for optimizing HTTP/1.1 and earlier protocols, though it's less critical with HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 which have built-in multiplexing. Implement it in web servers, proxies, or client-side configurations to handle high-traffic scenarios efficiently.