Actually take back a lot of what I wrote above. I forgot that SimpleHTTPRequestHandler only supports HTTP 1.0; I don’t think it uses keep-alive or persistent connections, so it should close its TCP connections promptly. There may be something else going on.

Unfortunately I don’t have Chrome handy to experiment with. Perhaps it is holding a TCP connection open without making any request at all, and then trying to open a second connection. You would have to look at the TCP connections being created and shut down, and the HTTP requests being made, to verify.