What does 'sockets disabled, connection limit reached' mean?

Question

I am running lighttpd-1.4 on Redhat4 and I got this error when lighttpd crashed:

2009-11-13 16:28:41: (server.c.1383) [note] sockets disabled, connection limit reached 2009-11-13 16:28:53: (server.c.1337) [note] sockets enabled again

What does this mean and how can I avoid it?

I have googled it and did not come up with anything useful.

Thank you

Answer 1

It means you ran out of file descriptors (1024 by default), read the lighttpd performance docs: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/wiki/1/Docs%3APerformance