I have an application that is using the HTTPUrlConnection to POST soap envelopes to a server and read the response in. We are having some problems, mostly likely to do with the server side potentially handling the connection incorrectly and keeping connections alive for longer, which in turn creates additional new persistent connections as requests come in rather than re-using the cached one.
I want to do some investigation into the nitty gritty of the HTTPUrlConnection, specifically if there is a way to find out how many connections are in the cache for a particular client/server pair.
Do you need to be able to determine this information through the Java API at runtime? If so, then I’d probably recommend using the Apache HTTPClient library instead, which provides many more features around this type of thing – including it’s HttpConnectionManager class.
If you’re only needing to determine how many connections are created and how many are in use, I’d recommend doing some monitoring through a tool like Wireshark. (netstat and even Process Explorer on Windows can be used to see the basics of how many connections are open and to where, etc.)