Enable Keep-Alive your views please

[ClaireH-184886]

Hi i am working on my site at the moment www.in2town.co.uk and i am going through y slow as well as http://gtmetrix.com/reports/www.in2town.co.uk/upnmEWvO  to make my website faster and better and it is telling me to enable keep alive.

Now i am not sure what this does but i have contacted my hosting company and they are asking me if there are any settings that i want.

my site is in joomla and it is a magazine site, can anyone let me know if it is a good idea to enable this or not and if so what settings should i be looking at.

my site is updated all day long so i need to make sure this is write for me.

many thanks

[AlanMosley]

You should turn it on, as for settings, I don’t know what they mean, they may be thinking of recycling.
I will explain the difference
Recycling, your website runs as a process, when a visitor comes to your site, it takes a bit of time to start up, rather then simply stop again once it has served the page, it stays running for a set amount of time, usually 20 minutes on a windows server. You can set this time in the server settings. You can also recycle the process after so many requests, or when it is using so much memory, or you can leave it running all the time.
Keep-alive, is when someone requests a page, they have to open a connection to your server for each item they download, each css file each js file and each image. Rather then open and close all these connections you can use keep-alve to keep the connection open until all objects have been requested.
It would seem that your host may be confusing the 2

Keep alive is turned on by default on a windows server, and as far as i know it either on or off, with no other settings

I did a quick look up for apache server, and there is a few settings.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/keepalive.html

a windows server will keep open till all requests are made. in the url there there are 2 settings, maximum requests and timeout, the defaults are 5 and 15, they seem fine for most websites.

But since you have joomla, you may want to extend max requests.
each image css and js fiel is a requests, joomla can have many css and js files.

[ClaireH-184886]

many thanks. after you great advice alan, it is now turned on