Does Volley create a new network connection for every request in Request Queue?

Question

I am using Volley as my networking library for my Android project. I'm curious to know when is a network connection opened and if Volley maintains the same connection when executing multiple POST requests using same request URL?

Answer 1

The answer lies in the HttpStackinterface implementation. Volley has two out of the box - the HurlStack that uses HttpUrlConnection and HttpClientStack that uses the Apache library.

A quick look at HurlStack shows that a new HttpUrlConnection object is created per request. Normally, connection pooling and reuse is handled by the HttpUrlConnection itself. I think that it will behave as smartly as possible and reuse as much resources as possible.

The same applies for the HttpClientStack. It uses a shared HttpClient to perform requests, so it's up to Apache's library to deal with connection pooling, etc.

To summarise, low-level network creation and maintenance is not something with which Volley deals directly. It's all a question of specific implementations, but, as far as I can remember, they will do as much of the heavy lifting for you as possible.