Keep alive header is used to maintain a persistent connection between a client and a server. It prevents the connection from breaking at irregular timeouts. So using keep alive, instead of establishing a new TCP connection for each new request, the same connection is used to process a HTTP request. By default, the HTTP connection is closed after each request is completed. In order to keep the connection open for multiple requests, we use keep alive timeout. The advantage with this is that we can reduce the loading time by creating multiple requests. Otherwise, the browser may take a lot of time to load. In Internet Explorer 11 we can use Connection Keep Alive for a persistent HTTP connection. We can set a time period of up to one minute which can be utilize the reuse the same TCP/IP socket. After remaining idle for a minute, the socket creates a new connection. Follow the steps below to change the keep alive time out.
change Keep Alive time out in Internet Explorer 11
- Press Win+R to launch Run.
- Type the following command and press Enter key.
- This opens Registry Editor. Click on HKEY_CURRENT_USER.
- Then, click on SOFTWARE.
- Further, click Microsoft.
- Navigate to Windows\CurrentVersion\InternetSettings.
- Right click on InternetSettings.
- From the options that appear, hover the mouse around New followed by DWORD(32 bit) Value.
- A new value will be created on the right hand side of the window. Give the name to the newly created value as KeepAliveTimeout.
- Click on the newly created value. A dialog box will appear. Change the base to Decimal and set the value as 120000. Click on OK and you are ready to go!
- You can exit the Registry then. The next time you launch Internet Explorer, the changes would have taken place.
Just so that you know, the time you specify is in the unit of milliseconds. So a value of 120000 milliseconds equates to 2 minutes.
- To reset what you have done, set the value of KeepAliveTimeout to 60000. Or you can delete the new entry that you have created altogether.
- On the contrary, if you wish to further increase the keep alive timeout to 3 minutes, or 180000 milliseconds. Set KeepAliveTimeout as value qual to 180000. Then, create a New DWORD(32 Bit) Value and name it as ServerInfoTimeout and give a value of 180000.
If the Web Server has a 2 minute time out value, then you can set KeepAliveTimeout as 2 minutes. Minimum value among Browser timeout and Server timeout, is always considered. So if the Web Server has a one minute timeout, changing the value won’t make any difference.
Sreelakshmi writes on Windows 10 tips and hacks.