J. Touch This document describes the problems associated with the accumulation of TCP TIME_WAIT states at a network server, such as a web server, and details two methods for avoiding that accumulation. Servers that have many TCP connections in TIME_WAIT state experience performance degradation, and can collapse. One solution is a TCP modification that causes clients to enter TIME_WAIT state rather than servers. The other is an HTTP modification that allows the client to close the transport connection, maintaining the TIME_WAIT state at the client. The goal of both approaches is ensure that TIME_WAIT states accumu- late at the less loaded endpoint. The document also presents initial performance data from reference implementations of these solutions, which suggest that the modifica- tions improve HTTP connection rates at the server by as much as 50%, and allow servers to operate at small transaction throughputs that they cannot sustain their default configuration.