urllib2 - closing sockets

[Steve Holden]

Anand Pillai wrote:
> I recently noted that urllib2.urlopen(...) for http:// urls
> does not make an explicit call to close the underlying 
> HTTPConnection socket once the data from the socket is read.
> 
> This might not be required since the garbage collector will
> close & collect open sockets that are not closed, but it might
> cause the system to run out of socket memory if there are 
> multiple threads, each opening a socket and the gc not running
> in between.
> 
> This specifically happens in my HarvestMan program which uses
> multiple threads to achieve fast offline web downloads.
> 
> A patch to fix this in urllib2.py would be nice.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> -Anand

In which case you'd be well advised to add this as a bug report on 
Sourceforge, as that is the only way to guarantee it will come to (and 
stay in) the developers' attention.

It isn't that hard to do.

regards
  Steve