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I'm using PHP's PDO layer for data access in a project, and I've been reading up on it and seeing that it has good innate support for persistent DB connections. I'm wondering when/if I should use them. Would I see performance benefits in a CRUD-heavy app? Are there downsides to consider, perhaps related to security?
If it matters to you, I'm using MySQL 5.x.
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The biggest drawback to persistent connections is that it limits the number of users you can have browsing your site: if MySQL is configured to only allow 10 concurrent connections at once then when an 11th person tries to browse your site it won't work for them. PDO does not manage the persistence.
Persistent Database Connections ¶ Persistent connections are links that do not close when the execution of your script ends. When a persistent connection is requested, PHP checks if there's already an identical persistent connection (that remained open from earlier) - and if it exists, it uses it.
The persistent connection cache allows you to avoid the overhead of establishing a new connection every time a script needs to talk to a database, resulting in a faster web application.
For the purpose of safe coding, you should always close database connections explicitly to make sure that the code was able to close itself gracefully and to prevent any other objects from reusing the same connection after you are done with it.
Because it is destroyed after every request, any resources that it acquires (such as a link to an SQL database server) are closed when it is destroyed. In this case, you do not gain anything from trying to use persistent connections -- they simply don't persist.
If there are bugs in your scripts which do not allow the connections to shut down (such as infinite loops), the database with only 16 connections may be rapidly swamped. Check your database documentation for information on handling abandoned or idle connections.
In general, you'll need to use non-persistent connections sometimes, and it's nice to have a single pattern to apply to db connection design (as long as there's relatively little upside to using persistent connections in your context.)
There are only few applications/users accessing the database, i.e. you will not result in 200 open (but probably idle) connections, because there are 200 different users shared on the same host. Your application only needs to access the database 100 times an hour. You're using Apache in prefork mode.
You could use this as a rough "ruleset":
YES, use persistent connections, if:
NO, don't use persistent connections, if:
Using persistent connections is considerable faster, especially if you are accessing the database over a network. It doesn't make so much difference if the database is running on the same machine, but it is still a little bit faster. However - as the name says - the connection is persistent, i.e. it stays open, even if it is not used.
The problem with that is, that in "default configuration", MySQL only allows 1000 parallel "open channels". After that, new connections are refused (You can tweak this setting). So if you have - say - 20 Webservers with each 100 Clients on them, and every one of them has just one page access per hour, simple math will show you that you'll need 2000 parallel connections to the database. That won't work.
Ergo: Only use it for applications with lots of requests.
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