TIME_WAIT

Linux TCP TIME_WAIT Retains Closed Connection State

A TCP socket can disappear from an application while the kernel still retains state for the closed connection. On Linux, the endpoint that completes the active close commonly enters TIME_WAIT, keeping enough protocol state to protect a later connection from delayed segments associated with the old one. This state is not evidence that a process forgot to close a file descriptor. The application-visible socket can already be gone. TIME_WAIT belongs to TCP’s connection-lifecycle machinery and persists independently of the process that initiated the close.