Closing Connections After Image Has Loaded

[audiopro]

I use Perl to create active HTML pages which are then served to a visitors browser.
I have a number of pages which contain 50 or more images.
If I refresh one of these pages a number of times (7/8) in succession, I am locked out of the server for 5 minutes due to 'too many connections'.

Discussions with my ISP reveal that the number of connections takes 2 mins to return to single figures after a single refresh.
I have no experience with servers except a couple of forays into the world of VPS which quickly became apparent that they were the worst of both worlds and returned to shared hosting, leaving the witchcraft and mystique of those beasts to people with far more patience that a software developer, like myself.

All this ramble is leading to a few questions and here they are.

Is this 2 minute shutdown of an open connection normal?
Is this a case of the keep-alive holding onto the connections?
Is there a way to configure a server so that connections are closed straight after the image is served?
Is keeping these connections open vital?

Any help would be gratefully received.




Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk