Question

I have searched and found that the general consensus is that using the 1.1 keep-alive for an indefinate period of time is not proper use of the 1.1 keepalive type of connection. We are tunneling through a proxy and wish to maintain this socket for a long time (forever if possible).

Putting aside that it may be not proper, is there some generally accepted maximum length of time?

The client side and server side software is custom so there is no issue there. We already have client with permanent persistent sockets. We are trying to overcome tunneling through a proxy which he have no access to using HTTP.

Thanks

Answer 1

Most browsers use less that two minutes, chrome being an exception with 5 minutes.

1. Opera 11.11 – 120 seconds
2. Chrome 13 – at least 300 seconds (server closed after 300 second
   timeout)
3. IE 9 – 60 seconds (changeable in the registry, appears to apply to
   IE 8/9 as well though the page only mentions IE 5/6/7)
4. Firefox 4 – 115 seconds (changeable in about:config with
   network.http.keep-alive.timeout preference)

I thing you should go with something similar to what browsers are using. I don’t think there is a single recommended maximum timeout.

This Stackoverflow post also might be usefull.