HTTPS requests and multi-threading

Is Java's URL class a thread-safe, in particular [URL.openConnection()](http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/net/URL.html#openConnection())?

In my application, I make tens o开发者_JAVA技巧f concurrent HTTPS connections a second to the same URL, and I would like to maximize object reuse. Yet, it's not clear from the documentation what can be reused.

EDIT: I'm open to using a different library if needed.

My standard response about HTTP and java is to recommend Apache HttpClient. It supports HTTP 1.1, so you can keep those connections open for reuse after you've had a successful HTTP request/response with the server.

It has built-in support for connection pooling and the documentation describes how to use it in a multithreaded context.

Yes. It's thread-safe. I use it in many threads and haven't found any issues.

The Sun's default handler also supports keep-alive by default so multiple threads may share the same connection. You have to be careful to read all responses (including ErrorStream). Otherwise, the next request will start in a bad state.

URL.openConnection will make a HttpsURLConnection object, which is a subclass of HttpURLConnection. The docs for HttpURLConnection state that it may use a single underlying connection to the server to statisfy multiple requests. I'm assuming this is sharing ala HTTP 1.1.

So you will get a new HttpsURLConnection object with each URL.openConnection call, but you won't get lots of network connections.