Too many open processes??

[Cabbar Duzayak]

I am using mysql_pconnect from PHP to connect to our mysql server.
However, whenever there is a temprorary surge in the number of users,
i.e. concurrent users jump from 30 to 200 for like 5 minutes, Apache
creates 200 processes and after the surge is over, they die
gracefully, and # of processes goes down to ~ 30.

However, this is not the case for MySQL. During the surge, it creates
200 processes and these processes stay there forever (till the next
re-start), even though there are only 20-30 concurrent users after the
surge.

Is there a way to configure mysql so that it will kill a process after
a certain period of idle time, just like Apache does?

Thanks...