If a reactive streams subscriber cancels mid response, currently, AHC will drain the response, and return the connection to the queue once done. This is not what happens when AsyncHandler.onBodyPartReceived returns ABORT, for example, when that happens, the connection is closed (I think). The problem we're seeing is that if you have an infinite stream (eg, a Twitter streamed search response), it's impossible to ever terminate it. Reactive streams response handling should terminate the connection upon a reactive streams subscriber cancelling.