In most network communication protocols, the timer is used as an efficient way to handle various expected and unexpected events. The timer management plays a very important role in the protocol implementation. Also, there are many ways to process the protocol timers. The purpose of this report is to find a protocol timer process mechanism which will improve the implementation performance of the Xpress Transport Protocol (XTP)--Sandia XTP, especially with XTP rate control. Based on previous work (Louis Harvey: In search of a rate control policy for XTP: unicast & multicast) and the analysis of the Sandia XTP implementation, the new timer management is proposed and implemented with Sandia XTP. Some experiments that focus on XTP rate control showed that the new timer management in Sandia XTP improved the XTP rate control and performance.