android retrieving large string from HttpGet

Question

I have an httpclient class i created. Within it i have a static method, "retrieveHttpGet(String url)", that returns a JSON object.

I'm using my own web API as the endpoint to retrieve data. Everything works fine when i'm retrieving a few lines of text. I'm trying to retrieve far more data though. When i try to pull around 20k characters of text i get the following errors

java.net.SocketException: Socket closed
at libcore.io.Posix.recvfromBytes(Native Method)
at libcore.io.Posix.recvfrom(Posix.java:131)
at libcore.io.BlockGuardOs.recvfrom(BlockGuardOs.java:164)
at libcore.io.IoBridge.recvfrom(IoBridge.java:513)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.read(PlainSocketImpl.java:489)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl.access$000(PlainSocketImpl.java:46)
at java.net.PlainSocketImpl$PlainSocketInputStream.read(PlainSocketImpl.java:241)
at org.apache.http.impl.io.AbstractSessionInputBuffer.fillBuffer(AbstractSessionInputBuffer.java:103)
at org.apache.http.impl.io.AbstractSessionInputBuffer.read(AbstractSessionInputBuffer.java:134)
at org.apache.http.impl.io.ChunkedInputStream.read(ChunkedInputStream.java:161)
at org.apache.http.conn.EofSensorInputStream.read(EofSensorInputStream.java:159)
at java.io.InputStreamReader.read(InputStreamReader.java:244)
at java.io.BufferedReader.fillBuf(BufferedReader.java:130)
at java.io.BufferedReader.readLine(BufferedReader.java:390)

Here is my the method i'm attempting to use

public static JSONObject retrieveHttpGet(String url)
{

DefaultHttpClient httpclient = new DefaultHttpClient();

// Prepare a request object
HttpGet httpget = new HttpGet(url); 
httpget.setHeader("Content-type", "application/json");

// Execute the request
HttpResponse response;
try {
    response = httpclient.execute(httpget);
    // Examine the response status
    Log.i("Praeda",response.getStatusLine().toString());

    // Get hold of the response entity
    HttpEntity entity = response.getEntity();
    // If the response does not enclose an entity, there is no need
    // to worry about connection release

    if (entity != null) {
        InputStream inputStream = null;
        String result = null;
        response = httpclient.execute(httpget);           

        inputStream = entity.getContent();

        result = convertStreamToString(inputStream);
        inputStream.close();
        // Transform the String into a JSONObject
        JSONObject jsonObjRecv = new JSONObject(result);
        // Raw DEBUG output of our received JSON object:
    //  Log.i(TAG,"<JSONObject>\n"+jsonObjRecv.toString()+"\n</JSONObject>");

        return jsonObjRecv;
    } 


} catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IOException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
} catch (JSONException e) {
    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
    e.printStackTrace();
}

return null;
}   

private static String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) {
        /*
         * To convert the InputStream to String we use the BufferedReader.readLine()
         * method. We iterate until the BufferedReader return null which means
         * there's no more data to read. Each line will appended to a StringBuilder
         * and returned as String.
         * 
         * (c) public domain: http://senior.ceng.metu.edu.tr/2009/praeda/2009/01/11/a-simple-restful-client-at-android/
         */
        BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        String line = null;
        try {
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                sb.append(line + "\n");
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } finally {
            try {
                is.close();
            } catch (IOException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        return sb.toString();
    }