Laravel Version

11.44.2

PHP Version

8.2.18

Database Driver & Version

MySQL 8.0.40 on RDS via RDS Proxy

Description

When we deployed our Laravel 10 -> 11 upgrade in April, there was a spike in DatabaseConnections through our RDS proxy which has since persisted (screenshot included below). We did not deploy any other changes to the AWS infrastructure - there were a high number of 3rd party Laravel package upgrades alongside it as expected with any major framework upgrade, however there's nothing within those upgrades that stand out as something that could introduce such a universally impactful change.

We have suspicions that it could be related to this change: https://github.com/laravel/framework/pull/50044/files but haven't yet A/B tested this as it's not feasible for us to rollback to L10 at this stage. The connections seem to be idle and it may be possible for us to workaround the issue by playing with the RDS proxy idle connection timeout settings, but preferably would like to understand the root cause.

Steps To Reproduce

I'm not sure exactly how to describe reproduction steps at this time, just raising awareness in case there are other people who have noticed a similar outcome or can perhaps educate me on how to navigate this situation as it feels possibly like a time bomb since our application experiences extremely high traffic surges during large event launches.