Shoul i keep a socket open for long time?

[nidzo732]

I have two computers on a network and some python programs running on them. Occasionally the programs will send some data to each other. There may be a long silence between individual messages. Should I keep an open socket all the time or create a new socket for every message?
Which of these is better:
This one


#keeps an open socket
s=socket(...)
s.connect(someAddress)
while True:
s.send(someData)
sleep(five minutes)

or this one


#creates a new socket for each individual communication
while True:
s=socket(...)
s.connect(someAddress)
s.send(someData)
s.close()
sleep(five minutes)

[bogustrumper]

My read of this page: http://docs.python.org/2/howto/sockets.html makes it sound like you're ever-so-slightly better off closing the socket when you're done sending.

Makes some intuitive sense to me... if the sending computer shuts off or gets disconnected by your cat/kid/housecleaner (or, more likely, crashes/hangs on some other line of code you've written and for some reason doesn't get to the normal garbage collection), the listening end could hang on their socket f it's still open. I'd doubt it'll matter too much beyond that, assuming you get the right behavior with both styles that you mentioned (ie, that there's not a noticeable overhead to opening the socket in the first place).