Jason Anthony Guy

Can someone with a better grasp of networking explain this?

https://photon.codes/blog/we-found-a-ticking-time-bomb-in-macos-tcp-networking

Something feels off about it, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Also, my Tahoe laptop system currently has an uptime of 83 days. I’m unclear if this is talking about total uptime, or uptime minus sleep time. And, does it require constant network connections within a window or is the usual “user level” network pattern enough?

We Found a Ticking Time Bomb in macOS TCP Networking — It Detonates After Exactly 49 Days - Photon Blog

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Apr 8 at 11:51pmIvory for iOS
Show threadKen McLeod4d ago
@JasonAnthonyGuy It doesn't blow up at 49 days, but it starts the clock ticking, so to speak. Every TCP connection made by your machine normally gets recycled after it closes. My understanding of this bug is that connections won't fully close and get recycled after the 49 day mark because a 32-bit time variable is now always in the past relative to the timestamp in those connections. How long you can keep using your machine depends on how many network connections you are making.
Show threadJason Anthony Guy4d ago
@_the_cloud Thank you! That makes much more sense than the system dying at ~49 days.
Show threadKen McLeod4d ago
@JasonAnthonyGuy In Terminal, you can see how many connections are in the TIME_WAIT state with this command: `netstat -an | grep -c TIME_WAIT`. If that number only increases over time and never goes back down, then you are experiencing the issue. Normally the number should return to 0 as connections are closed.