You can force the kernel to reuse the TIME_WAIT buckets though, by setting the /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_tw_recycle entry to 1. I have tested this, and it works: very few TIME_WAIT entries will be present when using this setting. It could be however, that using this could affect the reliability of TCP connections. I believe problems may arrise in NAT environments.

This makes those annoying TIME_WAIT connections go away faster...

--timball

TIME_WAIT sockets in Debian GNU/Linux