Persistent connections and pipelining

["Cameron Dale" <camrdale@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I was looking at the wireshark output for an apt-get download
recently, and I noticed that the mirror was closing the connection
after every file received. I did a test of the mirrors and found that
40 of about 360 mirrors behave like this, including several of the
primary country mirrors (most notably ftp.fr.d.o). These mirrors,
though they are HTTP/1.1, send a "Connection: close" header with every
request.

I know this behavior is within the HTTP/1.1 spec, but I'm curious why
a mirror admin would want to disable this feature. The advantages
described in the HTTP spec seem very convincing. Are there any admins
who can shed some light on this?

Thanks,
Cameron