MySQL Spawns more than one connection per page load

My setup is Drupal 5.9, RHEL 5.1, Apache 2, MySQL 5, PHP 5. When I load a page, it executes all of the queries and loads without any issues. At least, that is how it appears. If I refresh the page multiple times in a row, it hits the server really hard. I have gone through and made multiple setting modifications to Apache, MySQL, and PHP with nothing actually fixing the issue. When we run the processlist from MySQL, it shows that on page load a lot of queries get marked and sleeping. I would think this is normal, things should queue if there is too much activity. However, we took the same queries and wrote a php script that opens the connection to drupal (same username), executes all the queries and displays info, closes the connection. This script runs through without any issues and does not add MySQL processes to the sleep queue. I have ran the devel module, and it looks as though most of the queries are running very fast (page load takes approximately less than one second on a normal page load). The issue is that it seems as though Drupal is maybe trying to have the queries threaded?

Any help with this or if I need to provide any additional information, just let me know and I will gladly provide it.

- Shane