Setting the KeepAlive property to a value of true
indicates that the client wishes to maintain a persistent
connection with the server. For those clients who wish to retrieve
a number of documents, this is more efficient because the client
does not need to connect, retrieve the document and disconnect each
time. Instead, the client can connect, retrieve each document and
then disconnect when it is finished. If the property value is
False, a persistent connection is not maintained, and the client
must establish a connection for each document that it wishes to
retrieve. This property should be set to the desired value before
establishing a connection with the remote server.
Note that this option is only available for those servers which
support version 1.0 or later of the HTTP protocol. For version 1.0
servers, the connection header field is set to the value
'keep-alive', which instructs compliant servers to maintain a
persistent connection. For version 1.1 and later, persistent
connections are the default. In this case, if the property value is
set to False, the connection header field will be set to the value
'close', telling the server that you wish to close the connection
after the document has been retrieved. It is possible that the
server may choose to close the connection itself, even if it
supports persistent connections. If the server does not support
persistent connections and the KeepAlive property is set to
True, the control will attempt to simulate them by automatically
reconnecting for each request.
The default value of this property is True. This promotes
consistency between FTP and HTTP transfer interfaces.