mysqld bringing down server

[David J. Trombley]

I now maintain a popular internet sports portal which runs mySQL. Last weekend, the server (x86 linux) started grinding to a halt. When I list the processes, there are many, many (much more than the number of webserver threads!) mysqld threads running at once, sitting on the CPU for long periods of time. This is new behavior, and when I restart the mysqld, this situation reliably occurs again in a minute or so.
How can I debug/repair this sort of thing? I have no idea what's going on, and I've never run into this sort of problem before. Is there any way to get connections to the backend to time out?

Also, the documentations makes some comment about the default settings for mysqld not being configured for high-load situations, but then fails to explain how to do this. Any suggestions?

-dj


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