SimpleAsyncHTTPClient and Connection:Keep-Alive

[cheesedoily]

SimpleAsyncHTTPClient does not support keep-alive requests, or at least not obviously so.

Happy to fork this and build it in if pointed in the right direction.

[nottombrown]

This would be great for me as well. +1

[bdarnell]

You're right that SimpleAsyncHTTPClient doesn't support any kind of connection reuse. Very roughly, to build this you'd add a pool of idle connections in SimpleAsyncHTTPClient that would be used in _process_queue if the host, port, and scheme match. Connections would add themselves to this pool when they finish a request if the server didn't close the connection. While idle, a connection would still need to listen for errors on the socket to know if the server has dropped the connection, and it's important to make sure that StackContext doesn't leak from one request to the next (I think that's already taken care of). Some sort of garbage collection of old connections that don't get reused would be nice.

Another consideration is proxies - when we add proxy support the semantics around connections will change. I'm not sure what that will look like yet.

[cheesedoily]

Ok awesome, we had exactly this in mind. Would you be interested in a pull request once we have this working?

[bdarnell]

Yes, of course.

[NickNeedsAName]

Have a fix for this, cleaning it up now

[ossareh]

Did that fix ever happen @NickNeedsAName ?