A TCP socket is an active connection between your computer and whatever web-connected service you are interacting with. Keeping TCP sockets open can be an issue sometimes because after you connect to the VPN, the existing sockets are for your actual IP, not the VPN IP that you just started using and so you might have some issues using sites or services.

That is why we decided to add a background feature in the Windscribe desktop app to close all TCP sockets when you connect to the VPN, so that they can be properly reset to the VPN IP.

Unfortunately, some applications do not handle this event properly. When Windscribe closes the TCP socket for a connection, whatever application was using the socket could end up causing a CPU usage spike, and in turn could cause issues using your computer. 

For this reason, we updated the Windscribe app to still close the sockets as it did before but also to monitor CPU usage to see if there was a significant spike after making a VPN connection. If that happens, the warning below will come up telling you that an application or service on your PC is using a high amount of CPU and it could potentially be due to the fact that we closed its TCP socket.

The warning lets you disable this behavior so no TCP sockets are closed when connecting (but keep in mind this can be risky to your privacy). You also have the option to turn this off in Preferences > Connection > Force close all TCP Sockets after connection