282149 - Provide API to disable keep-alive connections

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: Networking: HTTP, enhancement)

Description

[Darin Fisher]

Provide API to disable keep-alive connections.

Right now, the only way to affect whether or not a request asks to make a
persistent connection or not is to change the global pref:

  network.http.keep-alive

That means that consumers who know that they are making requests that result in
long-lived responses have to toggle this preference before calling NewChannel. 
That is pretty ugly.  It would be better if we either:

(1) supported some kind of flag on the channel itself, or
(2) honored user-set Connection headers

Option 2 might be nice anyways since "Connection" is the only hop-by-hop header,
and one could imagine an application wanting to define a new hop-by-hop header
(i.e., a new value for the Connection header).  That said, 1 is nice because it
is more explicit.

Comment 1

[Darin Fisher]

-> default owner

Comment 2

[benc]

-> http.

Comment 3

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

LOAD_FRESH_CONNECTION