large amount of mysql time_wait connections

[Chris Isaksen]

I'm running MySql 5.6 on suse linux 11 sp3 with 17 DB instances on a single server. Running netstat -tn I see a large number of time_waits (over a 1000) and they are all comming from the localhost. Here is a sample.

tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:60486 127.0.0.1:3314 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:43025 127.0.0.1:3311 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:3320 127.0.0.1:52815 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:40709 127.0.0.1:3318 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:44243 127.0.0.1:3321 TIME_WAIT
tcp 0 0 127.0.0.1:41131 127.0.0.1:3317 TIME_WAIT

I also was tracking the connections status variable on one of the instances and it was growing at a rate of a connection a second, but had only 2 active connections in the process list.
All connection errors were 0, max_connections at default of 151. My question is what is making all of these connections ?

Any explainations would be helpful.
Thanks