Apache HttpClient Interim Error: NoHttpResponseException

HttpClient 4.4 suffered from a bug in this area relating to validating possibly stale connections before returning to the requestor. It didn't validate whether a connection was stale, and this then results in an immediate NoHttpResponseException.

This issue was resolved in HttpClient 4.4.1. See this JIRA and the release notes

Accepted answer is right but lacks solution. To avoid this error, you can add setHttpRequestRetryHandler (or setRetryHandler for apache components 4.4) for your HTTP client like in this answer.

Nowadays, most HTTP connections are considered persistent unless declared otherwise. However, to save server ressources the connection is rarely kept open forever, the default connection timeout for many servers is rather short, for example 5 seconds for the Apache httpd 2.2 and above.

The org.apache.http.NoHttpResponseException error comes most likely from one persistent connection that was closed by the server.

It's possible to set the maximum time to keep unused connections open in the Apache Http client pool, in milliseconds.

With Spring Boot, one way to achieve this:

public class RestTemplateCustomizers {
    static public class MaxConnectionTimeCustomizer implements RestTemplateCustomizer {

        @Override
        public void customize(RestTemplate restTemplate) {
            HttpClient httpClient = HttpClientBuilder
                .create()
                .setConnectionTimeToLive(1000, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
                .build();

            restTemplate.setRequestFactory(
                new HttpComponentsClientHttpRequestFactory(httpClient));
        }
    }
}

// In your service that uses a RestTemplate
public MyRestService(RestTemplateBuilder builder ) {
    restTemplate = builder
         .customizers(new RestTemplateCustomizers.MaxConnectionTimeCustomizer())
         .build();
}

Most likely persistent connections that are kept alive by the connection manager become stale. That is, the target server shuts down the connection on its end without HttpClient being able to react to that event, while the connection is being idle, thus rendering the connection half-closed or 'stale'. Usually this is not a problem. HttpClient employs several techniques to verify connection validity upon its lease from the pool. Even if the stale connection check is disabled and a stale connection is used to transmit a request message the request execution usually fails in the write operation with SocketException and gets automatically retried. However under some circumstances the write operation can terminate without an exception and the subsequent read operation returns -1 (end of stream). In this case HttpClient has no other choice but to assume the request succeeded but the server failed to respond most likely due to an unexpected error on the server side.

The simplest way to remedy the situation is to evict expired connections and connections that have been idle longer than, say, 1 minute from the pool after a period of inactivity. For details please see this section of the HttpClient tutorial.