RabbitMQ, memcache, and too many socket connections

What happens when you have hundreds of services connected to RabbitMQ and memcache, and those services have a bug that causes them to keep their previous socket connections open, and repeatedly reconnect to RabbitMQ and memcache?

They crash.

It occurred to me that one can prevent too many connections using iptables on the RabbitMQ and memcache machines. Here’s how:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/iptables-connection-limits-howto/

The corollary is that setting the per-ip connection limit too low can also cause problems.

I’d guess that more commonly public-facing servers like NGINX and Apache don’t have the problem of crashing. Hopefully, they degrade gracefully, and refuse additional connections while continuing to service the connections they already have open.