User-383274733 posted
Hi, I have been experimenting a bit with this feature and wanted to use this for loadbalancing purposes, but realized that it still uses keep-alive connections even though the response is a 503.
I'm not sure if there is a reason behind this, but in the scenario where one is using a load-balancing proxy, such features might "stick" a visitor to a certain server until the keep-alive connection is killed, which would work against the principle of a
failover cluster.
In comparision, a web-site that has been shut down manually, will start returning a 404, with a connection: close header to efficiently kill the current persistent connection, and a retry would shuffle the visitor to another server.
Some load-balancing systems do send a RESET packet to all active connections on a node, but this isn't necessarily an option.
According to this dialog:
https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=56555
Both Tomcat and Apache httpd enforces a connection: close header for 503 responses. IIS even does this if it hits the connection limit configured.
I tried adding it manually using rewrite rules, but to no avail.