 <p>I can't comment on whether its more effective to use HEAD or trying to do something like drop to the system and do a ping; but I don't think either of them is the solution you should be doing. IMHO, it isn't necessary to poll your connection. There are a lot of situations where a connection could be dropped and I don't think polling will provide much in the way of mitigating the problem. Also, the user might be annoyed. I know that if I were using an application, and then started doing something else, and all of a sudden I got a "connection lost to 3rd party error" from an application I wasn't even paying attention to; I would be very annoyed.</p> <p>If your application depends on a connection being present, then I think its fair to handle this with exception handlers. I'm willing to be bet that whatever API you're using throws some kind of exception whenever you attempt a network action and you aren't able to establish a connection. So, what I would do is in whatever class you're initializing the network action, I would follow this paradigm:</p> <pre><code>try { performNetworkAction(); } catch (NoConnectionFoundException e) { // handle the situation here } </code></pre> <p>Your application shouldn't be able to determine when a connection was lost, just how to react when you attempt a network action and no connection is found.</p> <p>That being said - you still may disagree with me. If that is the case then the frequency of polling allowed/recommended might be documented in the API for the service you're using. Also, if the resource from the 3rd party is static, you should cache it as opposed to getting it over and over again.</p>