HELP: Huge number of simultaneous connections to the db server

[jl255]

My forum is running very slowly and even after disabling all plugins. The issue seems to be stemming from the huge number of connections that are being made to the database server. Currently there are over 5000 simultaneous connections and while there are only about 65 PHP processes, these are taking up a large amount of resources - possibly because of poor queries being made to the MySQL server.

I did check the queries that are running on MySQL and they are not running slowly - the server is responding well, but the forum server is just opening so many connections for whatever reason.

Can I get some assistance on this? My forum version is 3.8.7. Tks.

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i've checked google analytics and it reports only 80 concurrent users. Though on my forum homepage, it reports 20000 current active users, most of which are guests.