You're close, but the rub is, every single http request uses the same agent (globalAgent), unless specifically passed an individual http agent or "{agent: false}" in configuration. So it is effectively a global connection pool. This has caused all kinds of performance issues in production applications. It can be easily shut off but it is easy to miss in the docs. The default of 5 has met its demise in 0.11 - the new default is Infinity.