Proxy pass and TIME_WAIT states

[Anıl Çetin]

Hi all
I am running nginx as a proxy server to apache,  on 3 of my production 
servers. In all servers there becomes thousands of connections that are 
in state of "TIME_WAIT" . I know that, a tcp connection in TIME_WAIT 
state can be reused, so,  will kernel/nginx use them or are the 
connections useless to kernel/nginx?

Sometimes kernel is saying  "TCP: time wait bucket table overflow" , 
means there is so much connections in state TIME_WAIT that I cant handle 
it. What is the effects of this? Will it reject new connections or begin 
to use connections in TIME_WAIT state rather than making a new connection?

Note: Apache's keepalive is off