Visit my.sonatype.com for documentation on Nexus Repository version 2.
In earlier versions of Nexus Repository 2 there was one thread spawned per repository. The default per-user process limit in Linux is 1024. So if you have a large number of repositories you can hit this limit.
As a short-term workaround, you can try adding the following to /etc/security/limits.conf (where "nexus" is the user ID of the user running Nexus Repository 2):
#<domain> <type> <item> <value>
#
nexus hard nofile 2048
nexus soft nofile 2048
Upgrading to Nexus Repository 2.4 or later will provide a better solution though, since these per-repository threads no longer exist.
Note: Sometimes this problem can occur if another process on the system (not Nexus Repository) is consuming so many process ID's that Nexus Repository cannot spawn new threads. To check for this, find the system-wide limit.
You can do this with:
cat /proc/sys/kernel/pid_max
Then run this to find out the total number of threads/processes on the system:
ps -eLf |wc -l