Large amount of http connections from self

I have a relatively high traffic linux/apache webserver running WordPress (oh the headaches). I think our developer configured the memcache settings incorrectly because when I run this command to look at all incoming httpd connections.

sudo netstat -anp |grep 'tcp|udp' | awk '{print $5}' | cut -d: -f1 | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

I get:

  1 68.106.x.x
  1 74.125.x.x
  1 74.125.x.x
  1 74.125.x.x
  1 74.125.x.x
 15 0.0.0.0
 70 173.0.x.x
194 127.0.0.1

…I see that I have 194 connections from 127.0.0.1, and VERY few from actual public IP’s. looking at netstat further I can see those are going to port 11211 (memcache). Even if I restart httpd, it only takes a few seconds for the open memcached connections from 127.0.0.1 to skyrocket up again and almost immediately we are pushing our max httpd process limit (currently MaxClients = 105).

Here are the details for those connections:

tcp        0      0 127.0.0.1:26210             127.0.0.1:11211             ESTABLISHED -

cat /etc/sysconfig/memcached

PORT="11211"
USER="memcached"
MAXCONN="1024"
CACHESIZE="64"
OPTIONS=""