I've done quite a bit of searching with no results on this.

I run LimeWire on a Linux box (RH 8.1) with
./Shared
as my shared directory.

I have a 2nd Linux box (old, old, Mandrake kernel 2.4.8-2mdksmp) that is a file server. Within the ./Shared directory on the system I run LimeWire is an archives directory
./Shared/archives
This archives directory is mounted from my file server via the mount command
mount -t smbfs //system/share ./archives

I have the file permissions set properly. LimeWire sees and successfully shares the mounted contents. Here is the problem - after a time, my file server stopped responding. With some work I was able to get a list of processes. There were a large number of smbd processes open. Looking on the LimeWire box I discovered a correspondingly large number of java processes running. My file server was also displaying the error "Too many files open in system" and then "error while loading shared libraries: lib-so.6: cannot open shared object file: Error 23." The archives share does contain a large number of files.

Can anyone give me some pointers on this? I think I am experiencing a combination of issues. It may in-part be LimeWire and how it accesses files to share. It may also be that I need to make more resources available on both systems.

Thanks.