We have a fairly busy website (1 million page views/day) using Apache mod proxy that keeps getting overloaded with connections (>1,000) in the TIME\_WAIT state. The connections are to port 3306 (mysql), but mysql only shows a few connections (show process list) and is performing fine.
We have tried changing a bunch of things (keep alive on/off), but nothing seems to help. All other system resources are within reasonable range.

I've searched around, which seems to indicate changing the tcp\_time\_wait\_interval. But that seems a bit drastic. I've worked on busy website before, but never had this problem.

Any suggestions?