# Bootstrap intermittently fails

**URL:** <https://discourse.chef.io/t/bootstrap-intermittently-fails/3583>\
**Category:** Chef Infra (archive)\
**Created:** [February 7, 2013, 10:04pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/bootstrap-intermittently-fails/3583 "2013-02-07T22:04:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![cjbottaro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a8b319/32.png) [@cjbottaro](https://discourse.chef.io/u/cjbottaro)\
**Post date:** [February 7, 2013, 10:04pm UTC](https://discourse.chef.io/t/bootstrap-intermittently-fails/3583/1 "2013-02-07T22:04:11Z")

</div>

I wrote a little script that tries to simultaneously bootstrap 10+ EC2  
instances. I get about a 50% failure rate with the error:

Bootstrapping Chef on [ec2-184-73-xxx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com](http://ec2-184-73-xxx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com)  
ERROR: Network Error: Connection refused - connect(2)  
Check your knife configuration and network settings

I suspect the Chef web server can’t handle that many concurrent requests?

Any ideas? Thanks for the help.