I have a MySql server which has 2 active databases which are used for a web application and 3 inactive ones (left for archival purpose but not currently used). The problem is that the server seems to have an abnormal amount of queries being run in it. For example, I would restart the server and within a minute the number if queries asked would jump to 800 - and then it never goes down below 6 queries a second.
To test this further, I removed all the database users from the active and inactive databases, so that web application users cannot connect to the server. Remote connection to the server is also disabled. The only remaining database user associated to the server was the user for PHPMyadmin. I left the system in this state so that no "real queries" can be generated, and I now have the following data:
Network traffic since startup: 535 MiB
This MySQL server has been running for 0 days, 14 hours, 41 minutes and 26 seconds.
Questions since startup: 31,858 Documentation ø per hour: 2,169 ø per minute: 36
Items with red flag (Warning):
Aborted clients 2
Aborted connects 1.1 k
Created tmp disk tables 48
Handler read rnd 17.9 k
Handler read rnd next 3 M
Innodb buffer pool reads 9.1 k
Key reads 2.2 k
Opened tables 757
Slow queries 56
Table locks waited 5
My server variables are attached here
The slow query log shows queries that we never wrote in our web application like:
SELECT /*!4001 SQL_NO_CACHE/* * FROM <tablename>
for every table in every database and a bunch of big union queries labeled as "Sends query", "Defers query", "SMTP query" etc.
My question is how is my server generating so many queries with no real user connected? Is this normal? Is there something I can do to Improve this?