Fastly This document defines the SendHoldTimer session attribute for the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Finite State Machine (FSM). Implementation of a SendHoldTimer should help overcome situations where BGP sessions are not terminated after it has become detectable for the local system that the remote system is not processing BGP messages. For robustness, this document specifies that the local system should close BGP connections and not solely rely on the remote system for session tear down when BGP timers have expired. This document updates RFC4271.