[spockz]

My understanding was that with http/1.1 all connections are kept alive until a close is emitted. How is this different?

[mgartner]

Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection#HTT... it sounds like your statement is correct.

But the fact that the underlying HTTP connection is kept-alive by default doesn't necessary mean that the client is going to actually re-use that connection for multiple HTTP requests. And, in fact, in Node.js the connection is not reused by default.

[robocat]

Although the keep alive periods may vary:

https://fastmail.blog/2011/06/28/http-keep-alive-connection-...