&gt; Hacky way to get around that is to enable tcp_tw_reuse which will let you reuse ports, but it can be risky if you get a SYN from the previous connection that happens to lineup with segment number of the current connection (which will close your connection)<p>Actually Linux will fall back to using TCP timestamps to distinguish between different connections. Ironically people will disable timestamps too to &quot;fix&quot; other issues[1] which also break PAWS[2] and may cause the issue you describing.<p>[1] It can break with some NAT and some load balancers. Actually the way I learned about tcp_tw_reuse was when we plugged in a new load balancer. We tested everything worked fine, but as soon as we sent production traffic many connections took few seconds to complete. Took 2 weeks to find the cause and looking at packet dumps. Turns out that the issue was that the load balancer was set up in active-active configuration, so different connections had different timestamps. This caused Linux to get confused and ignore some packets. Turned out one of managers wanted to make everything performant and copied some sysctls (that included tcp_tw_reuse and tcp_tw_recycle) from Internet without much though. After restoring the setting everything worked flawlessly.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmission_Control_Protocol#TCP_timestamps" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transmission_Control_Protocol#...</a>