PHP mysql connections help ( ubuntu LAMP server)

So last night I had a cpu spike for 100% for 30 minutes which made the server not very usable :-(

The server doesn't seem to be the quickest even today (its running on Amazon cloud!).

The application is a chat application which only has about registered 5 users who's client polls a php script every every 5 seconds for new information ( each request hits mysql).

Running some commands I found on the net it returned that I have 200 thousand connections - is this active or since the server was up?

Can anyon offer any advice if there is anything out of the ordinary in the below.

(Note these stats are from toda开发者_StackOverflow社区y where there were only 2 users logged in)

120 thosand connections since your mysql running up. About 100% of cpu. Check apache logs in /var/logs/apacheX looking for excessive error messages. It can be the server slow.