In networking, “time_wait” refers to a state that a TCP socket enters after a connection has been closed. During this state, the socket remains open for a period of time (typically 2 minutes) to allow any delayed packets from the previous connection to be received and processed. While in time_wait, the socket cannot be reused for new connections, which can lead to resource exhaustion and performance degradation, especially in high-volume networking environments.
There are several ways to avoid time_wait, including: