HTTP socket connection remains in TIME_WAIT well after page is served

Question

I am seeing a lot of long lasting TIME_WAIT connections to port 80 on my Apache 2.2.3 server on Red Hat Linux 6. I confirmed that even after pages have loaded, the connection remains in this state for more than 10 seconds, sometimes a lot longer than that. Why would this be? I have not configured anything special in Apache, no cache is enabled on server, and no proxy is out in front. AJP_Proxy is used via module to proxy Tomcat to port 80.

Answer 1

Why would this be?

Because that's what it's supposed to do. The default value for /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_fin_timeout on a Linux system is 60 seconds (IMHO this is a bit excessive for most purposes). You can change it simply by writing to the file.