Duration server waits for client ACK?

[edit: in case this isn't painfully obvious, the question below pertains to TCP sockets. The platform is Solaris 8 but I'd be a bit surprised if that mattered]

I'm troubleshooting something and can't find an answer to this question.

In the case where a client tries to connect to a server, gets queued, times out and gives up on the connection ....

what state is the server in? I assume the connect call on the client side generated a SYN packet, and I figure the server didn't get around to sending back a SYN/ACK.

Now if the server picks up this moribund connection from its queue and sends a SYN/ACK, how long will it wait for the client to reply?

In case this looks like I'm trying to build a better DoS attack, I should say that we have a client out in the field that's coded to wait only 15 seconds for a connect() to succeed, and dump it at that point if it failed. We also happen to have servers running close to their max-connections, so they're very likely to wait longer than 15 seconds before trying to honor the clients call.

That's why I'm asking this question.

Thanks.