How to have open more than 65k concurrent connections?

[johndole at hush.ai (johndole at hush.ai)]

Hi,

I am somewhat new to networking. I have interest in running a 
Bittorrent tracker. I ran one for a bit, and my one Linux box 
running Opentracker gets overloaded. My connection is good, and 
most of it isn't being used. Just a lot of people connect, and use 
up all the 65k "free connections". I tried messing with the 
sysctls, but it didn't help too much (and just degraded the 
connection quality for everyone). It is not a malicious attack 
either as there is only a few connections per IP and they are 
sending proper Bittorrent tracker requests...

So what can I do? How can I have have open more than 65k concurrent 
connections on standard GNU/Linux?

Thanks for any ideas and suggestions.

-John