Cannot assign requested address - possible causes?

Question

I have a program that consists of a master server and distributed slave servers. The slave servers send status updates to the server, and if the server hasn\'t heard from a

Answer 1

It turns out that the problem really was that the address was busy - the busyness was caused by some other problems in how we are handling network communications. Your inputs have helped me figure this out. Thank you.

EDIT: to be specific, the problems in handling our network communications were that these status updates would be constantly re-sent if the first failed. It was only a matter of time until we had every distributed slave trying to send its status update at the same time, which was over-saturating our network.