Why don't my sockets close?
Why don't my sockets close?
When you issue the close() system call, you are closing your interface
to the socket, not the socket itself. It is up to the kernel to close
the socket. Sometimes, for really technical reasons, the socket is
kept alive for a few minutes after you close it. It is normal, for
example for the socket to go into a TIME_WAIT state, on the server
side, for a few minutes. People have reported ranges from 20 seconds
to 4 minutes to me. The official standard says that it should be 4
minutes. On my Linux system it is about 2 minutes. This is explained
in great detail in ``2.7 Please explain the TIME_WAIT state.''.
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