Keep-alive HTTP and HTTPS connections can remain open and inactive for up to 2 minutes in Node.js 6.16.0 and earlier. Node.js 8.0.0 introduced a dedicated server.keepAliveTimeout which defaults to 5 seconds. The behavior in Node.js 6.16.0 and earlier is a potential Denial of Service (DoS) attack vector. Node.js 6.17.0 introduces server.keepAliveTimeout and the 5-second default.