I draw borders on all my x clients with external tools, ala wmutils, so I can do WM-external logic like tags or other visual indicators that the original author did not account for.

Occasionally, all my window borders stop being drawn, and my bg (usually set with feh) stops being set!

Upon poking, I'll usually find something like this as an err message:

~Maximum number of clients reached on X~

Many moons ago I saved this snippet from the internet to find out who is hogging the most clients:

~lsof -U +c 15 | cut -f1 -d' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -3~

And usually I'll find steam or a web browser to a be a culprit, and killing them will free up some connections. My hazy understanding of the situation is there's a limit to the socket connections that can be made to the X server, and even once terminated, those connections take time to expire and free up room for more connections(?) - this problem would be exacerbated by bunches of one off X border draw tool calls, is the only thing I can imagine.

Can anyone explain more clearly why this happens? or if there's some linux socket limit value I can tweak against my better judgment?

Thanks,
neeasade