An option to force keepalives for POST during forward proxy

[Michael Spiegle <mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a situation where being able to use keepalives for POST methods 
would be very handy.  Essentially, I have a series of .NET webservers 
that POST data to a linux-based webservice.  The .NET webservers and the 
the linux servers are geographically distributed, so we have a 65ms 
latency between them.  The average POST body size is 40-50KB.

Our goal is to significantly reduce the time it takes to make these 
POSTs.  We have tried using TCP Window scaling and keepalives on the 
.NET servers, however the .NET framework appears to have many bugs in 
this regard and is not reliable.  We have decided that our best course 
of action is to have the .NET servers talk to the webservice through a 
small cluster of squid proxies.  This way, we can use Linux's reliable 
TCP Window scaling.  Unfortunately, squid doesn't keep persistent 
connections on the backend for POSTs.

I read a message from the list a while back that this was done on 
purpose because using POSTs with keepalives is not well defined.  I 
believe there should be an option to allow this sort of behavior and 
would like to investigate implementing it myself if there are no other 
plans to do it.  My webservice is running behind Apache, and it seems to 
properly handle POSTs with keepalive.

Can anyone point me in a general direction to get started on this?  I am 
 not familiar with the squid codebase.  Also, does anyone know how much 
work it might be to implement this?

Thanks,
Mike