What could happen if I don't close response.Body?

Question

In Go, I have some http responses and I sometimes forget to call:

resp.Body.Close()

What happens in this case? will there be a memory leak

Answer 1

See https://golang.org/src/net/http/client.go
"When err is nil, resp always contains a non-nil resp.Body."

but they do not say when err != nil, resp always is nil. They go on to say:
"If resp.Body is not closed, the Client's underlying RoundTripper (typically Transport) may not be able to re-use a persistent TCP connection to the server for a subsequent "keep-alive" request."

So I have typically solved the issue like this:

client := http.DefaultClient
resp, err := client.Do(req)
if resp != nil {
   defer resp.Body.Close()
}
if err != nil {
    return nil, err 
}