Too many connections in TIME_WAIT and CLOSING state

[archit]

Hi All ,
I am facing a problem . I have a proxy server which runs on port 8080 . I have my clients connecting to an backend application running on a linux machine which in turns connects to my proxy server ( on linux box - Rh 7.2 2.4.7 ) .
When I do a netstat on my proxy machine i see this

Closing - 400 connections
Established - 20 connections
TIME_WAIT - 800 connections.

I have 2 questions.

1) CLOSING comes when there is a simultaneous close . But when i see the backend m/c netstat the corresponding sockets are in FIN_WAIT state.
2) Why are there so many TIME-WAIT states , is there a way to reduce the timeout for TIME_WAIT state ?

Thanks
Archit