HttpClient keeps TCP ESTABLISHED indefinitely to IIS server

[Loren Siebert <lo...@siebert.org>]

My program uses separate threads to make repeated HTTP1.1 calls to various
external web servers, all of which run Apache, except for a lone IIS site.
Everything works fine, but over the course of a few hours, `netstat -a`
shows a growing number of ESTABLISHED connections to that IIS server. My
calling thread never returns from performing the GET request. What seems odd
to me is that the IIS server never cleans these up--- they can stay
ESTABLISHED for days if nobody restarts anything.

I have Googled around quite a bit and the only hint I found was this bogus
content-length bug
(http://www.securiteam.com/windowsntfocus/6W00F0K3FW.html). The behavior is
identical, but my problem only occurs maybe once in every 50 requests. I was
not sending a Content-Length header in my request, so I added one just in
case (with length set to 0), but the results were the same.

Has anyone seen this before, or have any clues on where I should look to
troubleshoot this? I am using alpha2 with Sun's 1.4.1_01 on Linux.

Thanks,
Loren