I'm new to Python and reading someone else's code:
should urllib.urlopen() be followed by urllib.close()? Otherwise, one would leak connections, correct?
You basically do need to explicitly close your connection when using IronPython. The automatic closing on going out of scope relies on the garbage collection. I ran into a situation where the garbage collection did not run for so long that Windows ran out of sockets. I was polling a webserver at high frequency (i.e. as high as IronPython and the connection would allow, ~7Hz). I could see the "established connections" (i.e. sockets in use) go up and up on PerfMon. The solution was to call gc.collect() after every call to urlopen.
should I call close() after urllib.urlopen()?