What is 127.0.0.1:62893? My Adventure in Diagnosing a Troubled Localhost.

Last updated on November 18th, 2025 at 12:44 pm

Well, I will tell you the truth, I spent all of the last Tuesday lying at my computer at 2 AM and seeing my program crash every fifth time with that terrible address already in use message. The culprit? Port 62893 on 127.0.0.1. I understand, in case you find yourself in this place because of something like that. I would like to take you through what I heard.

So What Actually Is 127.0.0.1:62893?

The brief explanation of this is that it is your computer talking to itself. The 127.0.0.0.1 component is the one known as a loopback address, or in other words your machine idly responds to its own message saying this is not the internet it is speaking to but me.

That is also the reason why you will hear it called as localhost in the development circles.

The :62893 bit? That’s a port number. There you see the computer you are using is some apartment building, and the address of your computer is 127.0.0.1. The apartment number that your service occupies is port 62893. Different services receive different ports not to tread on the toes of each other.

I was disappointed to know that when both my Node.js app and a random caching server went to occupy port 62893 they would both lose and nothing would be served as a result of the conflict. Chaos ensued.

My Nightmare my Address Already in Use.

Thereupon I was struggling to boot my development server. I gave my usual order and hoped that everything would go as I hoped it would go last night. Instead:

Error: listen EADDRINUSE: address already in use 127.0.0.1:62893

First reaction? Restart everything. Didn’t work. Second reaction? Google frantically at 2 AM.

It happened that some process was already camping out on that port. In order to locate the troublemaker, I entered the following in my Mac:

lsof -i :62893

Boom. And here it was in that rogue Memcached which I had put on to debug and had long forgotten. In windows, netstat -ano findstr 62893 would have the same information.

Why Port 62893 Specifically?

Interesting fact that I learned here is that port 62893 is not special. It occupies what is known as the dynamic port range (49152-65535) which simply implies that it is subject to temporary things. Caching systems such as Memcached use it in some instances however there is no rule of thumb.

It may as well be port 3000, 8000 or 62894. It is important to ensure that there is no other thing using it.

How I Actually Fixed It

After finding out the process that was hogging my port I could do it through two methods:

Alternative 1: Kill the conflicting process.

kill -9

Alternative 2: I will simply choose another port to my app.

I chose the first solution because I did not require that Memcached instance any more. But honestly? In situations where you really want something running, it is more clean to change the port of your app.

In my case (with Node) all that is necessary was to update the configuration:

app.listen(62894, '127.0.0.1', () => {
lock.log Server is running on the key of 127.0.0.1:62894.
});

Problem solved.

When Localhost Gets Weird

Gotchas that I fell into during the period of troubleshooting include:

Your localhost can not be viewed in Docker containers. When you are running docker and want to access 127.0.0.1 within a given container it will not be possible. The pot also has a loopback. On Mac/Windows, you should use host.docker.internal, however, on Linux using the bridge gateway IP.

Firewalls have the ability to block localhost. Sounds weird, right? Your traffic does not go out of your machine, yet security program does not bother. Windows defender has blocked my local development server in the past. It was fixed with the addition of a firewall exception.

Ports in TIME_WAIT state. After the stop of a service, the port remains in the waiting state a little. You must restart too many times and you will get that error of already in use yet nothing is running. Wait 30 seconds or change ports.

The importance of this to the development.

As soon as I got to know the meaning of 127.0.0.1:62893, localhost was clear to me. I am currently using several services at once:

• Frontend on 127.0.0.1:3000
• API on 127.0.0.1:8000
• Database on 127.0.0.1:5432

They each have their own port and all those communicate in the locality without involving the internet. The it is suitable to test pre-deployment.

Ngrok is also another tool that I started using when testing webhooks. The single command ( ngrok http 62893 ) establishes an external address through which one can access my localhost, meaning that a service such as Stripe can access my local server. Game changer.

The Bottom Line

The thing that that late-night debugging session taught me is useful: localhost is not a secret, once you know the fundamentals. 127.0.0.1 is the internal address of your machine. Port numbers are simply channels of various services. When one collides with the other, you trouble-shoot, troubleshoot and forge ahead.

To begin with, to identify what is using your port, the first thing to do is lsof or netstat, should you ever have a similar problem. Hack it, modify it or hack around it. And bear in mind– all the developers have been. You are not the sole one in the 2 AM terminal battle.