Notes on Persistent Connections

In order to provide a highly scalable service that meets the needs of high-throughput merchants, while reducing the number of idle connections that could result in some merchants exceeding their connection limits, Worldpay systems allow for 10 seconds of idle time before closing a connection. We selected this value because it is the midpoint between the Apache httpd 2.0 default value of 15 seconds and the Apache 2.2 default value of 5 seconds. Also, HTTP/1.1, which most modern HTTP client libraries use, employ persistent connections by default. When using a persistent connection, please keep the 10 second idle time limit in mind, when coding. If you do not use persistent connections, to avoid connection limit issues, please validate that your default configuration closes connections after each request.

Proper use of persistent connections is considerably faster than opening and closing connections with each request.