[mysql] MySQL show status - active or total connections?

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?

This is the total number of connections to the server till now. To find current conection status you can use

mysqladmin -u -p extended-status | grep -wi 'threads_connected\|threads_running' | awk '{ print $2,$4}'

This will show you:

Threads_connected 12

Threads_running 1  

Threads_connected: Number of connections

Threads_running: connections currently running some sql

It should be the current number of active connections. Run the command processlist to make sure.

URL for reference: http://www.devdaily.com/blog/post/mysql/how-show-open-database-connections-mysql

EDIT: Number of DB connections opened Please take a look here, the actual number of threads (connections) are described here!

SHOW STATUS WHERE `variable_name` = 'Threads_connected';

This will show you all the open connections.

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)

As per doc http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-status-variables.html#statvar_Connections

Connections

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

You can also do

SHOW STATUS WHERE `variable_name` = 'Max_used_connections';

To see a more complete list you can run:

show session status;

or

show global status;

See this link to better understand the usage.

If you want to know details about the database you can run:

status;

In order to check the maximum allowed connections, you can run the following query:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "max_connections";

To check the number of active connections, you can run the following query:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "max_used_connections";

Hope it helps.