This question might sound stupid, but I haven't found straight answer in the documentation.

If I have 2 workers with 1024 worker connections, that gives me 2048 open connections limit.
With keepalive set to 60 seconds, I could have all 2048 connections established.

If clients tries to connect while there are 2048 connections established, will some of the inactive keepalive connections be dropped, or the new connection will be rejected?

I like speed that I get with keepalive but I want to avoid that someone DOS my server by creating bunch of keepalive connections.

If nginx rejects new connections, what would be the solution, beside lowering keepalive, increasing number of worker connections and maybe limiting number of connections per IP (not helpful with DDOS)?

Thank you all in advance.