[sockets] When is TCP option SO_LINGER (0) required?

I think I understand the formal meaning of the option. In some legacy code I'm handling now, the option is used. The customer complains about RST as response to FIN from its side on connection close from its side.

I am not sure I can remove it safely, since I don't understand when it should be used.

Can you please give an example of when the option would be required?

I like Maxim's observation that DOS attacks can exhaust server resources. It also happens without an actually malicious adversary.

Some servers have to deal with the 'unintentional DOS attack' which occurs when the client app has a bug with connection leak, where they keep creating a new connection for every new command they send to your server. And then perhaps eventually closing their connections if they hit GC pressure, or perhaps the connections eventually time out.

Another scenario is when 'all clients have the same TCP address' scenario. Then client connections are distinguishable only by port numbers (if they connect to a single server). And if clients start rapidly cycling opening/closing connections for any reason they can exhaust the (client addr+port, server IP+port) tuple-space.

So I think servers may be best advised to switch to the Linger-Zero strategy when they see a high number of sockets in the TIME_WAIT state - although it doesn't fix the client behavior, it might reduce the impact.

The listen socket on a server can use linger with time 0 to have access to binding back to the socket immediately and to reset any clients whose connections are not yet finished connecting. TIME_WAIT is something that is only interesting when you have a multi-path network and can end up with miss-ordered packets or otherwise are dealing with odd network packet ordering/arrival-timing.

In servers, you may like to send RST instead of FIN when disconnecting misbehaving clients. That skips FIN-WAIT followed by TIME-WAIT socket states in the server, which prevents from depleting server resources, and, hence, protects from this kind of denial-of-service attack.

When linger is on but the timeout is zero the TCP stack doesn't wait for pending data to be sent before closing the connection. Data could be lost due to this but by setting linger this way you're accepting this and asking that the connection be reset straight away rather than closed gracefully. This causes an RST to be sent rather than the usual FIN.

Thanks to EJP for his comment, see here for details.

For my suggestion, please read the last section: “When to use SO_LINGER with timeout 0”.

Before we come to that a little lecture about:

• Normal TCP termination
• TIME_WAIT
• FIN, ACK and RST

Normal TCP termination

The normal TCP termination sequence looks like this (simplified):

We have two peers: A and B

1. A calls close()
   • A sends FIN to B
   • A goes into FIN_WAIT_1 state
2. B receives FIN
   • B sends ACK to A
   • B goes into CLOSE_WAIT state
3. A receives ACK
   • A goes into FIN_WAIT_2 state
4. B calls close()
   • B sends FIN to A
   • B goes into LAST_ACK state
5. A receives FIN
   • A sends ACK to B
   • A goes into TIME_WAIT state
6. B receives ACK
   • B goes to CLOSED state – i.e. is removed from the socket tables

TIME_WAIT

So the peer that initiates the termination – i.e. calls close() first – will end up in the TIME_WAIT state.

To understand why the TIME_WAIT state is our friend, please read section 2.7 in "UNIX Network Programming" third edition by Stevens et al (page 43).

However, it can be a problem with lots of sockets in TIME_WAIT state on a server as it could eventually prevent new connections from being accepted.

To work around this problem, I have seen many suggesting to set the SO_LINGER socket option with timeout 0 before calling close(). However, this is a bad solution as it causes the TCP connection to be terminated with an error.

Instead, design your application protocol so the connection termination is always initiated from the client side. If the client always knows when it has read all remaining data it can initiate the termination sequence. As an example, a browser knows from the Content-Length HTTP header when it has read all data and can initiate the close. (I know that in HTTP 1.1 it will keep it open for a while for a possible reuse, and then close it.)

If the server needs to close the connection, design the application protocol so the server asks the client to call close().

When to use SO_LINGER with timeout 0

Again, according to "UNIX Network Programming" third edition page 202-203, setting SO_LINGER with timeout 0 prior to calling close() will cause the normal termination sequence not to be initiated.

Instead, the peer setting this option and calling close() will send a RST (connection reset) which indicates an error condition and this is how it will be perceived at the other end. You will typically see errors like "Connection reset by peer".

Therefore, in the normal situation it is a really bad idea to set SO_LINGER with timeout 0 prior to calling close() – from now on called abortive close – in a server application.

However, certain situation warrants doing so anyway:

• If the a client of your server application misbehaves (times out, returns invalid data, etc.) an abortive close makes sense to avoid being stuck in CLOSE_WAIT or ending up in the TIME_WAIT state.
• If you must restart your server application which currently has thousands of client connections you might consider setting this socket option to avoid thousands of server sockets in TIME_WAIT (when calling close() from the server end) as this might prevent the server from getting available ports for new client connections after being restarted.
• On page 202 in the aforementioned book it specifically says: "There are certain circumstances which warrant using this feature to send an abortive close. One example is an RS-232 terminal server, which might hang forever in CLOSE_WAIT trying to deliver data to a stuck terminal port, but would properly reset the stuck port if it got an RST to discard the pending data."

I would recommend this long article which I believe gives a very good answer to your question.

Whether you can remove the linger in your code safely or not depends on the type of your application: is it a „client“ (opening TCP connections and actively closing it first) or is it a „server“ (listening to a TCP open and closing it after the other side initiated the close)?

If your application has the flavor of a „client“ (closing first) AND you initiate & close a huge number of connections to different servers (e.g. when your app is a monitoring app supervising the reachability of a huge number of different servers) your app has the problem that all your client connections are stuck in TIME_WAIT state. Then, I would recommend to shorten the timeout to a smaller value than the default to still shutdown gracefully but free up the client connections resources earlier. I would not set the timeout to 0, as 0 does not shutdown gracefully with FIN but abortive with RST.

If your application has the flavor of a „client“ and has to fetch a huge amount of small files from the same server, you should not initiate a new TCP connection per file and end up in a huge amount of client connections in TIME_WAIT, but keep the connection open and fetch all data over the same connection. Linger option can and should be removed.

If your application is a „server“ (close second as reaction to peer‘s close), on close() your connection is shutdown gracefully and resources are freed up as you don‘t enter TIME_WAIT state. Linger should not be used. But if your sever app has a supervisory process detecting inactive open connections idleing for a long time („long“ is to be defined) you can shutdown this inactive connection from your side - see it as kind of error handling - with an abortive shutdown. This is done by setting linger timeout to 0. close() will then send a RST to the client, telling him that you are angry :-)