Persistent HttpURLConnection in Java

Solution 1:

According to the documentation here, HTTP persistence is being handled transparently in Java, although it gives you the options to control it too via http.keepAlive and http.maxConnections system properties.

However,

The current implementation doesn't buffer the response body. Which means that the application has to finish reading the response body or call close() to abandon the rest of the response body, in order for that connection to be reused. Furthermore, current implementation will not try block-reading when cleaning up the connection, meaning if the whole response body is not available, the connection will not be reused.

Take a look at the link and see if it really helps you.

Solution 2:

According to this link http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/guides/net/http-keepalive.html, HTTP connection reuse is enabled by default, you can use Wireshark to check the interactions between your client and server. The first request contains TCP and SSL handshakes(if your request is https), the subsequent requests fired in the keep-alive time, contains no TCP and SSL handshakes, just application data transfers.