There are two ways to avoid getting TIME_WAIT states in the first place: 1. Convince the client to close the connection. The initiator of the close will be th

There are two ways to avoid getting TIME_WAIT states in the first place: 1. Convince the client to close the connection. The initiator of the close will be the one holding the TIME_WAIT socket (for ~2 minutes) 2. Send RSTs to clients that refuse to close. RST avoids creating a TIME_WAIT state. I think this is slightly more dangerous than a normal FIN close, because wandering duplicates could interfere with the next connection. From Python, you can close a TCP socket in a way that causes a RST to be sent: # Set SO_LINGER to 1,0 which, by convention, causes a # connection reset to be sent when close is called, # instead of the standard FIN shutdown sequence. self.socket.setsockopt(socket.SOL_SOCKET, socket.SO_LINGER, struct.pack("ii", 1, 0)) (From the patches and branch in http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/78 http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/ticket/78)