In one of my testing scenario, socket was not getting closed. This was happening when an XMPP client was connecting to a domain which was different from the domain in the jabber ID of the connection user. Moving the close call to a finally block ensures that socket gets closed in all scenarios. Test-information: I created an IM domain j.com on my XMPP Server and then added a user with that domain (user@j.com). Then I tried connecting to my Primary domain using this new user. After removing j.com, I could an increase in number of sockets after every poll (coreclient.connect()) but not after this patch.