On my webservers, I noticed that I have an abundance of TIME_WAIT connections. Is this normal?

I was reading up on this in an attempt to try and close them but from what I understand, you can't close them until both sides of the connection have aggreed that there is no more information to be exchanged.

Is it possible the connections are staying open do to the programming of the web pages?

Do web connections usually stay open because there are generally many web requests between the client and the server and it is more effecient to keep it open?

If I were to close the TIME_WAIT connections sooner, do you think that would improve performance or at least increase the number of web connections one server could handle for a given period of time?

There is a timeout on the TIME_WAIT connections in the tcp.h file so I will try and cut that down from 60 seconds to 30 seconds. Is this a bad idea?

thanks in advance

in doing so would you be discriminationg against users on a low bandwidth and high delay connections???

I do not believe so because the socket does not change to TIME_WAIT until all the information had been exchanged. So after the web page had completely finished loading for the client, then the socket would change to TIME_WAIT from what I understand. I could be wrong.