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anonymous-one
Asked: 2013-09-28 11:35:27 +0800 CST

Do keepalives to socket connections exist?

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Pre briefing:

Although my question is broad on purpose, I am dealing with nginx connecting to php-fpm (fcgi), which is served via a local socket (/tmp/somesocket.socket).

Nginx has a setting to keepalive connections to fcgi backends ( http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_fastcgi_module.html#fastcgi_keep_conn ).

This is what my question relates to.

Question:

In linux, when making connection to local sockets, does such a thing as keepalives exist?

Would having a connection kept alive remove (even a tiny bit) some overhead related to creation / teardown of the connection?

Thanks.

linux

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I am assuming you mean local unix sockets here.

    In linux, when making connection to local sockets, does such a thing as keepalives exist?

    No, keepalives prevent the remote side timing out. Since the host knows the status of both sides of the connection a keepalive is redundant.

    Would having a connection kept alive remove (even a tiny bit) some overhead related to creation / teardown of the connection?

    Yes, at the cost of maintaining more file descriptors which is probably a very cheap cost in practical terms. Setting up a connection and closing it incurs 5 system calls (open and connect on client, accept on server, close on client/server) which with maintaining the connection is avoided until necessary.

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