The Idle Connection Timeout is a way of garbage collecting discarded connections. Since Layer 7 services act as full proxies, if a client discards its connection without informing the LoadMaster the connection will not be closed. As a result, it continues to take up RAM on the LoadMaster. Increasing the Idle Connection Timeout may have the result of increasing these dead connections and leading to increased RAM utilization. Lowering this will ensure that these connections are closed in a reasonable amount of time.

It is recommended that the Idle Connection Timeout be set as low as possible and as allowed by both client and server. Please consult application-specific documentation or a Progress Kemp Customer Support Engineer. As a general rule of thumb, web services work well with the LoadMaster default value of 660 seconds.