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Also known as: keep-alive connection
A connection held open across many article fetches instead of being torn down after each one. Setting up a TCP session and a TLS handshake costs a round trip or two, which would dominate the time spent on small segments, so download clients keep sessions alive and reuse them. Servers close idle ones after a timeout, typically a few minutes.
Browse all terms in Protocol & Server Infrastructure, or see the full Usenet glossary.