Anybody knows what determines the number of running mysqld processes !?

I haven't been able to understand why I have inbetween 50-80 of the all the time (I mean OS processes seen in top/ps etc)

I run version 5.0.16 on Linux

How busy is your server , and what is it used for?

MySQL is meant to handle multiple requests. If you have a very busy db, and it's not eating up all of your memory, then it may be normal. Without knowing exactly what your configuration is used for - it's hard to analyze.

If you want to see the processlist just run in mysql console:
show processlist;

if you want to see the number of processes on system try:
ps axuwwww | grep mysqld | wc -l

If you wan to see the number of connection on your database try:
netstat -tn | grep ":3306" | wc -l

Regards
Adrian

The server is very busy and I am trying to figure out what the actual problem is...