Unlike most other requests, when the HttpClient is performing a streaming POST the request cannot be retried in case of failure. Generally this shouldn't be an issue in a correctly configured environment, but if there is a discrepency between the servers keep-alive time and the clients (java) then we may run into a situation where we attempt the post over a disconnected connection. We could test that the connection is still alive upon KeepAliveCache retrieval in order to mitigate the problem.