CLOSE_WAIT status slowing down my web service?

Hmmm. The CLOSE_WAIT status is a state in which a socket goes waiting for the other end to also close the socket. It also waits in case any lost packets arrive, since the packet is destined for a port which might get reused and hence the new owner would get an unsolicited message.

Now, the number of ports available for backward connections (which is the majority of these close-wait sockets) is around 24,000 (16 bit port number of which those below 8K don't get used), so you won't run out of those. Each socket under Unix becomes effectively a file descriptor so the number of open files (Kernel parameter) should be made as high as possible.

That said however, the normal situation is that a listener (like INet) wakes up a process and passes the incomming connection to it. This process then produces the response and closes the connection.

It is very unlikely that an incomming connection cannot be allocated a socket number since they are all in close-wait. It is more likely that there is no process available to process the connection, since they are all busy dealing with other connections.

I would suggest that you post a question regarding "How to optimise my IPlanet Web Server", since there are people here who have dones such things. I very much doubt that it is a socket problem.

HTH