Open an input stream to a socket

Question

How many times I can open an input stream to a socket? If I create more than one an input stream to a socket, does this affect anything?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Generally low level classes do not have high level logic. Socket is a low level class, it's only logic is to connect you to something, and allow you to read and write to that thing (through the socket) using streams. Being able to connect multiple times or setting marks on your stream is a higher level of logic. Putting to much logic is low level classes tends to reduce re-useablility (making unmarkable streams markable as nothing to do with sockets and can be re-used upon any streams that do not support to be marked) and sometimes performances (having marks means having a buffer means having a potential big memory allocation in your Socket that you do not control).
So in your case, since you are not really interested in re-connecting a socket, you should rather go for a wrapping InputStream that provides marking capabilities over the streams used by the socket class itself.
   Socket socket = getSocket();
   // this one does not support to be marked
   InputStream stream = socket.getInputStream();
   // but now it does :)
   stream = new BufferedInputStream( stream );