Keep-Alive acceleration, is this possible?

[Nick Loman]

Hi there,

On our platform we have had to disable Keep-Alive support on our 
Apache/FastCGI/PHP setup because it holds open too many backend 
processes under load even with KeepAliveTimeout set low.

I am looking at Varnish as a web accelerator (it looks great!), and I 
wonder if it is possible to get the best of both worlds, i.e. the user 
still gets KeepAlive support, but the backends server one script per 
connection.

I was thinking it might be possible to strip out the "Connection: Close" 
header returned by Apache, hopefully resulting in the client keeping its 
connection to Varnish. My question is: would Varnish realise that the 
backend connection has been closed but still keep the client connection 
open so that that future requests could be made on that same connection?

Would this have any adverse side-effects?

Grateful for your help

Nick