Slave connecting to maser always stay connected?

I have a setup with 2 masters (nway multimaster) and 4 slaves each having syncrepl set up to connect to the 2 masters. The question I have, with the following configuration (on the slaves) should they always be connected to the masters? Netstat is showing that the connections are intermittent:

type=refreshAndPersist retry="60 +"

Netstat on the masters shows that the connections from the slaves will vary ­ sometimes 0, sometimes 4 ­ seems to be somewhat random. We are trying to determine if there is something wrong in our network. Thanks for the help.

MAT