Question

I’m making a program which sends data to many TCP listeners. If one of the TCP Sending channel is no more used, do we need to close it using TCPClient.close. What happens if we leave it open?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I wouldn’t use Close explicitly – I’d just dispose it via a using statement:

using (TcpClient client = ...)
{
    // Use the client
}

What happens if we leave it open?

If neither side closes the connection, it’ll be sitting there doing nothing, pointlessly.

If the other end closes the connection, I suspect you’ll have a local connection in TIME_WAIT or something similar for a while; I don’t know the exact details but it’s not ideal.

The main point is that it may use up some system resources, and fundamentally it’s not ideal. Is it going to cause your program to crash and your system to go crazy? Probably not – at least unless you’re creating a huge number of these. It’s still a good idea to dispose of anything with non-memory resources though.