Recently my server CPU has been going very high.
CPU load averages 13.91 (1 min) 11.72 (5 mins) 8.01 (15 mins) and my site has only had a slight increase in traffic.
After running a top command, I saw MySQL was using 160% CPU!
Recently I've been optimizing tables and I've switched to persistent connections. Could this be causing MySQL to use high amounts of CPU?