Apache - MaxClients of 1000 exceeds ServerLimit value of 256 servers.

Due to the election day, yesterday our apache cluster was not able to serve all the requests so we need to raise MaxClients paramenter on each node. Unfortunatly the new value was exceeding the ServerLimit value so we had to raise it accordingly. Despite this on restart apache was again complaining that MaxClients was exceeding ServerLimit value:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
* Forcing reload of web server (apache2)...
WARNING: MaxClients of 1000 exceeds ServerLimit value of 256 servers,
lowering MaxClients to 256.  To increase, please see the ServerLimit
directive.

These are the interesting lines in /etc/apache2/apache2.conf. Can you see something wrong here? It was hard for me to figure out how to fix the problem!

StartServers            10
MinSpareServers         10
MaxSpareServers         20
MaxClients              1000
ServerLimit             1000
MaxRequestsPerChild     0

Here the right one. The point is: ServerLimit must be put before MaxClients directive!

StartServers            10
MinSpareServers         10
MaxSpareServers         20
ServerLimit             1000
MaxClients              1000
MaxRequestsPerChild     0

Hope this help you!