https://nalar.dev/tags/time_wait/ Recent content in TIME_WAIT on Nalar Hugo en-us Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0700 https://nalar.dev/linux-tcp-time-wait-retains-closed-connection-state/ Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0700 https://nalar.dev/linux-tcp-time-wait-retains-closed-connection-state/ <p>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 <code>TIME_WAIT</code>, keeping enough protocol state to protect a later connection from delayed segments associated with the old one.</p> <p>This state is not evidence that a process forgot to close a file descriptor. The application-visible socket can already be gone. <code>TIME_WAIT</code> belongs to TCP&rsquo;s connection-lifecycle machinery and persists independently of the process that initiated the close.</p>