How to force disconnection in commons-httpclient?

Question

I use commons-httpclient to send queries to a Web server. The Web server never closes connections, but has a small memory leak associated to the connection context.

I would therefore like to close the persistent connections from time to time (every X queries for example), but I did not find any way to do this. I use the MultiThreadedHTTPConnectionManager

I could use MultiThreadedHTTPConnectionManager.closeIdleConnections(very_small_delay), but that's not very reliable: if my Java code has much work to do, then it's possible that no connection is ever idle, because there are always other threads waiting for a free connection.

Thanks,

Answer 1

after executing one method, let's say GET, you can read the responsed HttpStatus number, to decide if a method.releaseConnection() needs to be called.

Or if you know which connection you wanna close, you could try

MultiThreadedHTTPConnectionManager
void    releaseConnection(HttpConnection conn) 

okay, I thought you have some reason that you want to 'kill' a connection. Assume you have the connection, the HttpConnection Object, which you want to close in hand. May this method help?

HttpConnection
public void close()

    Closes the socket and streams. 

Answer 2

Are you calling method.releaseConnection()?

http://hc.apache.org/httpclient-3.x/threading.html#Connection_Release

Answer 3

Can you afford to use SimpleHttpConnectionManager(boolean alwaysClose)?

httpClient.setHttpConnectionManager(new SimpleHttpConnectionManager(true))

Answer 4

When I am using releaseConnections() still there are connections in CLOSE_WAIT state. Is it okay if I add closeIdleConnections(0) after releaseConnections?

Will this mean even if the connection is sent back to the pool to be used by other clients but is not closed/released then closeIdleConnections will close it?