How does PHP communicate with MySQL on the same server

Question

Does anyone know how php requests data from mysql?

If I have mysql in the same machine as php, does it open a tcp connection to the localhost on port 3306 or does it have some other way of getting the data?

Is it the same in linux and windows?

Thanks

Answer 1

if available it uses a unix socket, otherwise localhost.

Note that even if you specify localhost in the connection string it will try to use the faster "unix socket" if available