I've got a strange issue with a server accepting TCP connections. Even though there are normally some processes waiting, at some volume of connections it hangs.

Long version:

The server is written in Perl and binds a $srv socket with the reuse flag and listen == 5. Afterwards, it forks into 10 processes with a loop of $clt=$srv->accept(); do_processing($clt); $clt->shutdown(2);

The client written in C is also very simple - it sends some lines, then receives all lines available and does a shutdown(sockfd, 2); There's nothing async going on and at the end both send and receive queues are empty (as reported by netstat).

Connections last only ~20ms. All clients behave the same way, are the same implementation, etc. Now let's say I'm accepting X connections from client 1 and another X from client 2. Processes still report that they're idle all the time. If I add another X connections from client 3, suddenly the server processes start hanging just after accepting. The first blocking thing they do after accept(); is while (<$clt>) ... - but they don't get any data (on the first try already). Suddenly all 10 processes are in this state and do not stop waiting. On strace, the server processes seem to hang on read(), which makes sense.

There are loads of connections in TIME_WAIT state belonging to that server (~100 when the problem starts to manifest), but this might be a red herring.

What could be happening here?