Worker Connections not being released

Hello all,
I have been developing an nginx module that allows the sending of zeromq
messages through nginx (inspired by
GitHub - FRiCKLE/ngx_zeromq: ZeroMQ transport for nginx).
The code base for this can be found here:
GitHub - neloe/ngx_zmq: An upstream ZeroMQ module for nginx

However, I’m running into an issue where when running with a minimal
location configuration of

location /zmq/{
zmq_endpoint “tcp://localhost:5555”;
zmq;
}

I am testing the location with the following curl command:
curl -s localhost:8080/zmq/ -X POST -d “hello”

with 256 worker_connections, 1 worker_process, and keepalive_timeout of
0,
requests to the location will start failing after 254 requests.

Increasing to 1024 worker_connections does not solve the problem, but
allows me to send 1022 requests before the following begins appearing in
my
error log:

2014/11/25 14:25:27 [alert] 10732#0: 1024 worker_connections are not
enough

Explicitly disabling keepalive/lingering connections does not seem to
solve
the problem; it feels like something somewhere is grabbing the worker
connection and never releasing it.

I have tried building the module against nginx 1.5.12, 1.7.4 and 1.7.7.
The older two versions are because they are the versions of openresty I
am
trying to use this module in conjunction with.

Any guidance as to what would be causing these connections to never be
released would be very welcome.

Thank you,
Nathan Eloe