Believe it or not, this was the root cause of FriendFeed's slowness over the last few days. - Tudor Bosman

(from "man nc") - Tudor Bosman

Slow friendfeed is fast? Oh much improved! - EricaJoy

Gory details: we have some scripts that use nc, which kept connections open, which caused our firewall's ip_conntrack table to fill up, which caused the firewall to drop packets, which caused packet loss, which caused slowness. - Tudor Bosman

Lesson: Bash scripts are lethal. - EricaJoy

netcat is an awesome tool. With a great tool comes great responsibility :) - imabonehead

Netcat is actually kind of weird and crappy, it just happens to be ubiquitous. Its connection-close behavior is only one of several slightly surprising aspects. Better to write Python code, IMHO, but of course I have no idea what you're doing... - ⓞnor from Android