MYSQL Monitoring: Why does DatabaseConnections grow while Queries stay the same?

Question

MySQL

There is a site on nginx + php-fpm + mysql
During the day, when users are most active on the site, the site starts to work slowly.
These are the mysql metrics - the number of Queries (in red) and the number of DatabaseConnections (in blue). It can be seen that at the time of loading, the number of connections increases. It is logical to assume that the number of requests should also increase. Or not? What could be the reason that the number of connections is growing while the number of requests remains the same? Or is this normal and how it should be?

Answer 1

The response time also grows apparently. The number of requests does not change, but more of them are executed in parallel. run longer. Look at slowlogs and memory-perc-disk during these spikes.