Closing the raw data tempfiles immediately on connection reuse caused any response reading to fail with an I/O error if another request started on the same connection in the meantime. Delaying the closing until the response object falls out of scope and gets GC'd ensures that as long as there is a reference to that object, it can be read from, at the expense of a possibly larger memory overhead.

Note that this should never matter anyway because the response is already run through the payload parser before.