Update: The number of connections are roughly equivalent to the number of sessions. If I take the server offline for a short period and restart it, the number of connections looks roughly double the number of sessions.....but appear to fall slightly as time goes on.

No scientific proof - but a speculative observation: The longer I leave the server offline the more connections I get for the same number of sessions. Also the more time I take the server offline, the more connections I get:

On startup: 32 sessions and 32 connections
Stop and restart: 32 sessions and approx 50 connections (falling to about 40)
Stop and restart: 32 sessions and approx 90 connections (falling to about 60)
and so on

So if I have 1000 sessions, and the server goes offline for a long period of time and then gets restarted, I think I am going to see some big numbers in the connections statistics compared to the sessions.

I think this only happens with clients that had a good connection, then lost it. They go into an endless connection/fail/retry cycle - and when the server comes on they seem to have more connections than they need.

This may be completely normal and expected of course.