How does URLConnection in java reuses the connection from the pool

Question

Can any one help me with a sample code of how the URLConnection reuses the connection?

URLConnection con = new URL("http://www.someurl.com").openConnection();

I am using the above code to make a URLConnection. For the first time, the URLConnection will open a new connection to the specified URL. But after that it will reuse the existing connection from the pool. Is there any to prove this (I mean through println()) ?

Actually is there any way to retrieve connection reused status from the pool?

Answer 1

From the java.net.URL javadoc:

Returns a URLConnection object that represents a connection to the remote object referred to by the URL.

A new connection is opened every time by calling the openConnection method of the protocol handler for this URL.

If for the URL's protocol (such as HTTP or JAR), there exists a public, specialized URLConnection subclass belonging to one of the following packages or one of their subpackages: java.lang, java.io, java.util, java.net, the connection returned will be of that subclass. For example, for HTTP an HttpURLConnection will be returned , and for JAR a JarURLConnection will be returned.

So for a http protocol url it will return a HttpURLConnection

From the java.net.HttpURLConnection javadoc:

Each HttpURLConnection instance is used to make a single request but the underlying network connection to the HTTP server may be transparently shared by other instances

So the underlining tcp connection might be pooled