I am dealing with performance issues and having trouble wrapping my head around Apache keep-alive connections. I understand that Apache is able to maintain a TCP connection for multiple requests, but I don't know how that connection is affected by a proxy on the client side. My company funnels all traffic through a proxy so that our requests all hit the server with one of a range of IP addresses. Those IPs might be the same for multiple users over different requests.
How does Apache hold keep-alive connections? Is it based on the IP address?
If my proxy is reusing IP addresses, could the persistent connection get passed from client to client as different clients get assigned the same IP?
If we have a couple dozen IPs used by the proxy, could they all hold a persistent connection and ultimately damage performance?
I'm hoping there's documentation I can consult on this topic, but all I've found thus far has explained what keep alive connections try to do without much explanation of how they accomplish these goals.
Thanks
