Persistant Connections in Apache2.0

I wrote a client to connect to my Apache server which uses parallel
persistant tcp connections. Now i've got the parallel down, but for
some reason after the firsts write/read and i write the second time,
the read returns 0, which I assume means the server has closed the
connection (note i'm using select to check the socket before i read
from it, so that means the socket has recieved data for me to read)

I assume there is some sortof setting i can put on apache so that the
connections are automaticly persistant.