It sounds like the problem is source port exhaustion, for the outgoing sessions that squid creates. > Why do you consider the TIME_WAIT as such to be a problem? There is no > significant problem to have some hundreds of thousand > TIME_WAIT sockets on a server port. Wouldn't there be a 65,536 limit as you can only have that many open ports? And if you were to hit that limit the only way to support more concurrent established or time wait connections would be to install another box? I think most distros restrict the source port range to a lot less than 65536 by default, for example my gentoo laptop has 28232 available; ie adam@absydos ~ $ cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range 32768 61000 So you should be able to open that up with sysctl to make more ports available.
