MySQL show status - active or total connections?

Question

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)

SHOW STATUS WHERE `variable_name` = 'Threads_connected';

This will show you all the open connections.

You can also do

SHOW STATUS WHERE `variable_name` = 'Max_used_connections';

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

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;