summary of the problem we are having a setup wherein a lot(800 to 2400 per second) of incoming connections to a linux box and we have a NAT device between the client and server. so there are so many TIME_WAIT sockets left in the system. To overcome that we had set tcp_tw_recycle to 1, but that led to drop of in comming connections. after browsing through the net we did find the references for why