Question y’all,

When I play with apache bench (ab) and I use the -k flag the output for the runs have this

Keep-Alive requests:    0

However if I try Cowboy for example it seems to report correctly

Keep-Alive requests:    15000   

as well as being a bit faster (due to reused connections no doubt). I tried this with a few other languages, golang etc and they seemed to handled keep alives with ab.

Now I did an initial search through Bandit docs but I’m not seeing any settings pertaining to this. I did see a small blurb saying it was supported in http/1.1. Ok hmmmmmmmmmm.

What exactly is ab pushing out? Let’s spin up tcdump

sudo tcpdump -i any -A 'port 4000'

GET /health-check HTTP/1.0                                                                                                               
Connection: Keep-Alive                                                                                                                           
Host: 127.0.0.1:4000                                                                                                                             
User-Agent: ApacheBench/2.3                                                                                                                      
Accept: */*          

huh http/1.0 so I’m guessing Bandit just doesn’t support keep alives in that version. I don’t know exactly what the difference is, I should probably read the http spec at some point, but I am asking if there’s an easy way I can configure Bandit to support that. No problem if there isn’t an easy way. I’m just having fun. But it does look like other servers do support this…probably for ab use cases