nginx status : requests?

Question

Acorrding to nginx stats module

server accepts handled requests -- nginx accepted 16630948 connections, handled 16630948 connections (no one was closed just it was accepted), and handles 31070465 requests (1.8 requests per connection)

I would like to know what the requests part means it say 1.8 per connection that does not make sense to me thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Nowadays keep-alive (or persistent) http connections are normal, especially in http 1.1. One keep-alive connection can handle more than 1 request.

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_persistent_connection