Dropping keepalives actually slightly hurts your best-case performance. As a config change, if you are using the prefork mpm (I wouldn't if scalability is your

Dropping keepalives actually slightly hurts your best-case performance. As a config change, if you are using the prefork mpm (I wouldn't if scalability is your goal) it will generally help you though. With prefork the scaling math on worker memory * connections vs your box's memory is often the first place things will fall apart if you have keepalives on and real traffic. I suggest the worker mpm if you don't want to switch to nginx.