#18 no persistent connection

[Anonymous]

Persistent connection doesn't work. I managed to modify the source code to make it happen. It seems that two modifications are needed:
1) in HttpUtilities.java, always make use of ThreadSafeClientConnManager. Currently only SSL requests use it.
2) in various REST apis functions, the response body needs to be slurped and the corresponding InputStream needs to be correctly closed such that the connection can be reused in the future.