Connection: Keep-Alive vs Connection: Close

[Nuno Magalhaes]

With the sniffer ethereal I get a lot of Connections Keep Alive in some
sites like google.com and that returns me the Content-Length in the
HTTP response header.

When the connection is Close I don't get the Content-Length but I get
an hexadecimal number that represents the size of the page but that is
after the header and in the page more precisely.

Is this normal to have this behaviour? I don't know how IE does to get
Connections Keep Alive and the respective Content-Length but between
the GET and the HTTP/1.1 200 OK from the response I see a TCP fragment
that I don't receive in my application.

Does this behaviour of Connection Keep Alive and Connection Close is
part of the HTTP RFC standards? Why does Internet Explorer gets more
connections keep alive than I? What a frustrating task to do.

Any help is appreciated,
Nuno Magalhaes.

 

[Vadym Stetsyak]

Read the HTTP Rfc. To get keep alives browser adds specific parameters to
the HTTP header, server recognizes them and doesn't close the connection,
but sends keep-alive....