Too bad it didn't help. I've run into that limit trying to use the tool "siege" to stress test apache, tomcat and different rails apps.
Hope you find what the problem is.
I think I recall one a podcast about an erlang project (i'm 70% sure it was an erlang project and not smalltalk), where they wanted to run on bsd, but eventually gave up because of some network issue and switched to linux. I'd suggest trying to boot the machine in ubuntu and give it a spin there, or see if you can max out a linux box that you already have access too. Linux has so many more users that the real world kinks are much more worked out than on OS X or BSD (I'm talking about server apps here).
Hope you find what the problem is.
I think I recall one a podcast about an erlang project (i'm 70% sure it was an erlang project and not smalltalk), where they wanted to run on bsd, but eventually gave up because of some network issue and switched to linux. I'd suggest trying to boot the machine in ubuntu and give it a spin there, or see if you can max out a linux box that you already have access too. Linux has so many more users that the real world kinks are much more worked out than on OS X or BSD (I'm talking about server apps here).