Coping with the TCP TIME-WAIT state on busy Linux servers

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2024-10-08 06:00:03

Do not enable net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle—it doesn’t even exist anymore since Linux 4.12. Most of the time, TIME-WAIT sockets are harmless. Otherwise, jump to the summary for the recommended solutions.

The Linux kernel documentation is not very helpful about what net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle and net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse do. This lack of documentation opens the path to numerous tuning guides advising to set both these settings to 1 to reduce the number of entries in the TIME-WAIT state. However, as stated by the tcp(7) manual page, the net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle option is quite problematic for public-facing servers as it won’t handle connections from two different computers behind the same NAT device, which is a problem hard to detect and waiting to bite you:

Enable fast recycling of TIME-WAIT sockets. Enabling this option is not recommended since this causes problems when working with NAT (Network Address Translation).