Thank you very much for your reply, Henrik. So a ulimit of 1000 ought to limit the total number of connections to about 300+. Looks like under my current 2.4 Linux kernel, maximum number of filedescriptors possible is around 26K, but only 1024 allowed per process:
# sysctl fs.file-max fs.file-max = 26208 # ulimit -a core file size (blocks, -c) 0 data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited file size (blocks, -f) unlimited max locked memory (kbytes, -l) unlimited max memory size (kbytes, -m) unlimited open files (-n) 1024 pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8 stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192 cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited max user processes (-u) 2047 virtual memory (kbytes, -v) unlimited -- Paul
