lua socket persistent connections

[Wesley Smith <wesley.hoke@...>]

I'm trying to do some XML-RPC stuff and am having some serious
problems with consistency.  It seems that about 1 of 5 tries works,
the rest timeout using the following code:

local response = {}
	http.request{
		url = url,
		method = "POST",
		headers = {
			["content-length"] = body:len(),
			["content-type"] = "text/xml",
			["user-agent"] = "Lua XMLRPC/0.0",
			["cache-control"] = "no-cache",
			["pragma"] = "no-cache",
		},
		source = ltn12.source.string(body),
		sink = ltn12.sink.table(response)
	}
	for k, v in pairs(response) do
		print("response: ", k, v)
	end


The web server and everything is all on my local machine, so there
shouldn't be a latency problem.  I'm sniffing the packets and
comparing them to an example built in JAVA that works flawlessly.
What I notice is that when the POST data happens to be split across
packets with different times (even 1 millisecond difference), it
fails.  This happens in the working software as well with one caveat:

In LuaSocket, the HTTP header ends with "connection: close" whereas
the flawless software ends with connect: keep-alive (uses persistent
connections).  Is there a way to do this in LuaSocket?  I'm not seeing
anything in the docs.

This is just a hunch since I'm not a networking expert by any means.
So if my logic about what is going wrong seems off, I'd like to know
as well.

thanks!
wes