Cloudflare

Keepalives considered harmful

Mar 19, 2020Ivan Babrou
Keepalives considered harmful
SummaryAI, from the source post

This post details an optimization where Cloudflare disabled keepalives for connections between the SSL termination layer and the FL (front-end load balancer) at the edge. By forcing new connections for each request, they ensured that requests were always picked up by an idle worker, thereby reducing latency spikes. This was achieved by modifying the behavior to close connections after each request, rather than reusing them.

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