We are using an object cache backed by memcached, however I think that WordPress will still connect to MySQL on every page load, which shouldn't be needed if all queries can be handled by the object cache, right?
The problem this gives is that I still need to scale the MySQL server to be able to handle many connections at the same time even though there aren't many queries executed at all, so it sounds like a big waste. The problem is extra problematic on my setup because my pages need data from external APIs, so the pageloading times will be higher than usual, during which time the connection will just be sleeping on the MySQL database and wasting a spot.
Any tips on how to solve this? In an ideal scenario there shouldn't be any MySQL connections made until/unless an actual MySQL query has to be run on the database.