Be careful when tuning your Linux servers. Sometimes strange things happen. I followed some of the directions listed here and our server rejected half the connections to Apache. I rectified that by making the values smaller, like this:
echo 32768 > /proc/sys/fs/inode-max
echo 19000 > /proc/sys/fs/file-max
Stats are up on previous days, so when tuning file handles go up slowly, not to the levels the previous document stated.