Re: WWW Form Bug Report: "keepalives fail from Windoze machines" on BSDI

On Wed, 26 Jun 1996, Rob Hartill wrote:

> >Access from Windoze machines loses with KeepAlives turned on.

This is really starting to bug me. Out of curiosity, does this just happen with Apache, or other web servers, too? Has anyone tried NCSA httpd or Spyglass or Netscape Enterprise/FastTrack, or any of the other web servers that support persistent connections? Heck, MIIS supports Keep-Alive, and its their operating system that this bug is related to, yes?

If it's really something Apache does that makes it not work, there's got to be a way to fix it. Otherwise, can we go yell at Microsoft? But really, the newest version of every major HTTP server supports Keep-Alive. If there really was such a bug in Windows, wouldn't you think browser manufacturers would have turned the darn thing off by now? *sigh* Has anyone asked the browser manufacterures about this? Have they said anything?

FWIW, poking at a couple servers (www.apache.org, hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu, www.spylgass.com, www.microsoft.com and help.netscape.com - you guess which one runs each server), I noted that all the servers but one time out in a "reasonable" amount of time when waiting for additional requests (Apache: 15 seconds, NCSA: 30, Spyglass: 10, Netscape: 15) - Microsoft's. I waited around for at least ten minutes, and it never timed out on me. Maybe that was their way around their own OS's bug? On the other hand, it might not be. After all, RST's apache-XX does the same thing (because with threads, it's almost without cost to keep connections around forever, until you run out of fds). But that was an interesting note...

> >Turning off KeepAlive seems like it should be a global
> >effect, but I have to do it in each virtual host section. There
> >does not seem to be a way to set it at the top level and
> >make it the default for all virtual hosts, too.

Hmm. This should probably work like that, but it doesn't. :)

• Alexei Kosut <akosut@organic.com> The Apache HTTP Server http://www.nueva.pvt.k12.ca.us/~akosut/ http://www.apache.org/