At the moment HttpURLConnection.getInputStream() returns
a (real) input stream even if there is no entity body
in the response ( Content-Length field in the header is zero).
If you try to read from this stream the application will block
until the server closes the socket.

---- Test case ----

import java.net.*;
import java.io.*;

public class Test {
    public static void main (String args[]) {
        try {
            URL url = new URL ("http://sunweb.ireland/");
            HttpURLConnection urlc = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection ();

            urlc.setRequestMethod ("OPTIONS");

            int r = urlc.getResponseCode ();
            System.out.println (r);
            InputStream is = urlc.getInputStream ();
            while ((r=is.read()) != -1) {
                System.out.write (r);
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace ();
        }
    }
}