is it at all important to close! a channel after it is not being used, reading the docs it seems to make no difference if I just leave it "unclosed" "forever".

Like any other object, it will be gc'ed when there are no more references to it, but I think it is a good idea to close them, similar to using a fileinputstream

@flipmokid: i recently implemented

what you describe using hash buckets, happy to show you the code if you want