Problems issuing continuous requests to a server through URLConnection

Question

Hi ,
I have a URLConnection object 'uc' obtained from a URL object tied to a server URL.
i m issuing HTTP requests continously to this server by calling ' uc = u.openConnection()' everytime
Hence this will return me a new URL Connection object everytime.
After some 300-400 requests, the program ends abruptly , this may be due to shortage of resources to be allocated to the I/O streams of the URL connection.
My question is -is there some way to issue multiple requests from the same URL Connection object ? or is there some other method of issuing multiple requests which does not consume a lot of resources ?
Note: The server accepts only GET method, so i cant write the contents to the output stream of the connection to translate it to a new request every time .
Thanx

Answer 1

My question is -is there some way to issue multiple
requests from the same URL Connection object ? or is
there some other method of issuing multiple requests
which does not consume a lot of resources ?
A HttpURLConnection instance can only be used to issue one http request. What can be re-used is the underlying TCP connection, with the keep-alive header (HTTP 1.1 persistent connections). But that should be handled transparently and by default by the servlet engine.
The later is able to manipulate the stream to increase performance, if you do not close the stream, i.e you don't call conn.disconnect() or by specify the "Connection: close" request property
( conn.setRequestProperty("Connection", "close") )
So, you shouldn't actually close the steam, just flush it (if you close it, the physical socket connection will be terminated).
All the http persistent connection/keep-alive issues were apparently fixed in J2SE 1.4.1 ....(are you using 1.4 ?)
To optimize further, you could take a look at :
http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/httpclient/