Spring JmsTemplate and Apache ActiveMQ, why so many connections?

Question

Hello,

I have a web application that runs text processing jobs in the background once a message is received on an ActiveMQ which is listened to by a Spring MessageListener....the problem I"m encountering is that once I process around 30 background jobs, ActiveMQ stops processing any messages, Spring message listener loses its JMS connection, and sometimes I get an error in the ActiveMQ log saying that there are too many open files.

I ran the 'lsof' (list open file) command on Linux against the ActiveMQ process and noticed that for almost each message queued/published/received by JmsTemplate, a new connection is opened. Is this normal?

here's my configuration:

<bean id="connectionFactory" class="org.springframework.jms.connection.CachingConnectionFactory">
    <constructor-arg ref="amqConnectionFactory" />
    <property name="exceptionListener" ref="jmsExceptionListener" />
    <property name="sessionCacheSize" value="100" />
</bean>