Can't restart memcached anymore

Hi,

My memcached has been working perfectly.

But all of a sudden I am not able to restart it anymore
(RAILS_ENV=production rake memcached:start),

getting this error message:

failed to set rlimit for open files. Try running as root or requesting
smaller maxconns value.

This has never happened before.

Does anyone know where and how to request a ‘smaller maxconns value’?

(Running root doesn’t help me. It tells me ‘can’t run as root without
the -u switch’… not sure what that means. Running the sudo rake task
with ‘-u’ shows no result at all…)

Thanks a lot for any help!
Justus