As is the disclaimer, 'apologies if this is posted in the wrong section' but I'm a little perplexed. I tend to be easily lead at times by testing such as PageSpeed Insights and YSlow. Usually I am satisfied with the results but today I have an irritating itch.

 

I received a recommendation to enable Keep-Alive. Having not come upon it before, I Googled the hell out of it and realised it was something I needed to follow up with the hosting company. It was a quick, albeit brief response. Their stance is it's not always necessary to have it enabled and sites can function perfectly without. Though it's a valid answer, I'm just wondering whether I should pay so much attention to the test results or just accept that it will not impact a site as much as I am lead to believe. After all, it does state it as a high priority.

Keep-alive allows visitors to make several requests to the server within one connection, and generally speeds things up. It's however not always great for server / PHP performance so your hosting provider may not be too keen to give it a glowing endorsement.

 

Best advice is to run a test on it. If you have SSH access, the test I'm using is AB Benchmarking which shows Requests Per Seconds (RPS) - the higher the value the better.

 

For a brief overview on Keep Alive see http://techportal.inviqa.com/2011/03/08/optimising-magento-for-performance/#keepalive

Thanks for the link! I'll have a look now.

You're welcome! Would be interesting to know how Keep Alives work out for you. If you have any test results, would be good to see them.