MySQL show status - active or total connections?

Question

When I run show status like 'Con%' it shows the number of connections, which is 9972 and constantly growing. Is this an active number of connections or connections made in total?

Answer 1

According to the docs, it means the total number throughout history:

Connections

The number of connection attempts (successful or not) to the MySQL server.

You can see the number of active connections either through the Threads_connected status variable:

Threads_connected

The number of currently open connections.

mysql> show status where `variable_name` = 'Threads_connected';
+-------------------+-------+
| Variable_name     | Value |
+-------------------+-------+
| Threads_connected | 4     |
+-------------------+-------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

... or through the show processlist command:

mysql> show processlist;
+----+------+-----------------+--------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
| Id | User | Host            | db     | Command | Time | State | Info             |
+----+------+-----------------+--------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
|  3 | root | localhost       | webapp | Query   |    0 | NULL  | show processlist | 
|  5 | root | localhost:61704 | webapp | Sleep   |  208 |       | NULL             | 
|  6 | root | localhost:61705 | webapp | Sleep   |  208 |       | NULL             | 
|  7 | root | localhost:61706 | webapp | Sleep   |  208 |       | NULL             | 
+----+------+-----------------+--------+---------+------+-------+------------------+
4 rows in set (0.00 sec)