Comment by hyperknot

I've just written my question to the nginx community forum, after a lengthy debugging session with multiple LLMs. Right now, I believe it was the combination of multi_accept + open_file_cache > worker_rlimit_nofile.

https://community.nginx.org/t/too-many-open-files-at-1000-re...

Also, the servers were doing 200 Mbps, so I couldn't have kept up _much_ longer, no matter the limits.