By Admin on Tuesday, 11 May 2021
Category: All

TIME_WAIT TCP Connections

When a client initiates a disconnection from server, there is an exchange between client and server to inform about the state of disconnection. When the process is finished, the client socket connection states as TIME_WAIT during a variable time. This is a normal behavior, in windows operating systems, this time defaults to about 4 minutes.

You can reduce or eliminate this behavior, do with careful, using the following alternatives.

Regedit 

You can reduce the TIME_WAIT value using the Windows Regedit

1. Open Regedit and access to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ Services\TCPIP\Parameters registry subkeys.

2. Create a new REG_DWORD value named TcpTimedWaitDelay

3. Set the value in Seconds. Example: if you set a value of 5, means that TIME_WAIT will waits as max as 5 seconds.

4. Save and restart the system.

LINGER 

Another option to avoid TIME_WAIT state, is use the socket option SO_LINGER, if enabled, instead of closing the connection gracefully, the client resets the connection so the TIME_WAIT state is avoided.

You can enable this option using LingerState property, by default has a value of -1. If you set a value of zero, the connection will be reset when disconnecting from socket without Timeout.

This options is probably the less recommended and only use as a last option.

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