numfiles and othersockbuf and privvmpages errors

I use this to find out how many openfiles are on my system
lsof | awk '{ print $1; }' | sort -nr | uniq -c | more

I get numfiles and othersockbuf and privvmpages errors- ie i am running out of RAM because of too many open files

it looks like everytime I run cron, the number of mysqld connections increases.

I set the wait_timout to 400.

I think that if a connection or process is halted after 400s if not executed. Is this correct?

How do I track down what is causing the increase in open files? it is very frustrating.

Thanks,
Chris