Lighttpd

When enabling the mod_status page, I have the following values:
fastcgi.requests: 32740
gw.active-requests: 0
gw.backend.0.0.connected: 32740
gw.backend.0.0.died: 0
gw.backend.0.0.disabled: 0
gw.backend.0.0.load: 0
gw.backend.0.0.overloaded: 0
gw.backend.0.load: 0

The value for fastcgi.requests and gw.backend.0.0.connected is varying quite a bit, from 2,000 to 32,000.
I am using Lighttpd 1.4.49 on CentOS 7.5 with php 7.2 from "remi"

As I understood the fastcgi.requests value should only get greater since it counts the requests since the last restart.
Lighti Config is pretty basic, except for some values:
server.max-keep-alive-requests = 16
server.max-keep-alive-idle = 4
server.max-connections = 8192
server.stat-cache-engine = "fam"
server.max-fds = 16384
server.network-backend = "linux-sendfile"
server.event-handler = "linux-sysepoll"
server.max-worker = 72
These were added for performance.

Any pointers as to why it could be fluctuating? Is the server constantly restarting?