It's been a while since I went to training on this stuff, but here's my thoughts. I don't think there is a relationship between the two. ACA is a combination of several metrics but take a look at the following statement:
The CSS 11000 uses the ArrowPoint Content Aware (ACA) service to gather response time data for every flow for building statistical averages/variances for every service and content rule. The best servers are used, while the slow servers are pruned from the eligible list. This service also can manage persistent connections for e-commerce based on IP addresses (range), Secure Socket Layer (SSL) application IDs, and cookies.
I found that here (http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/117/methods_load_bal.html). What that tells me is that ACA doesn't really care about keepalives, it cares about the flows to that server. A simple ICMP keepalive will not create a flow and therefore can't be part of the calculations. Now if you were doing your keepalive based on a script, tough to say, but it would be a flow at that point.
Rick
