Connections increasing at +10 per second with no requests

[Ian Young]

I suspect this is an out of control host process, but they're being very unhelpful.

I have a relatively straight forward Wordpress installation and I'm getting huge page loads of multiples of 30 seconds, always 30, 60, 90 and even more, sometimes up to 180 and 210 seconds. I often get Mysql went away errors, sometimes with max_user_connections errors, sometimes without.

After lots of digging to no avail, I ended up creating a staging site on a new database (different IP and port to the existing one, but within the same shared environment I guess) with no plugins enabled. I'm the only person who has access to the staging site, so I know exactly what requests are hitting the server and when.

My Connections are increasing at the rate of 10 a second without a single request. I'm now at over 580,000 Connections and the database has been up and running for a little over an hour.

Threads hover at about 15.

My Max_used_connections so far is 58 for some reason. I have only performed 3 or 4 page requests on the site and have now closed all tabs that could possibly access the staging site with hidden ajax requests etc. so I have no idea how I could have made it to 58 concurrent requests on my own.

Can anyone shed any light? Malware searches come up blank, at least within public_html.

Thanks