oversized [ports] section && 'stopped reporting'

one of our servers have up to 6000 TIME_WAIT tcp connections from time to time. This got truncated, of course. I want to see them all. any quick way to change the upper limit w/o recompilation ? Also, for the same server, from time to time, certain checks 'stopped reporting' [ files & msgs, in particular ] for some extended period, sometimes over 35m, while other checks kept going. I wonder if the message truncation triggered by the over-sized [ports] section caused this loss. Or should I look elsewhere ? This 'reporting-stopped' symptoms occur with or without an actual PORT check configured for the clients under questions.