opening db connection many times

[zoofy]

I have made a site that is based on one one php file. It takes variables from url for example "index.php?site=info" so it's a quite long php file.

Now I open mysql connection everytime I need it and then close the connection. So my site connects to db about 5 times while loading the site.

Would it be faster to open the connection at the start of the page and close it at the end?

[gyoung]

Connecting to the database incurs a substantial overhead so you would only want to do this once per script.

Also see:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-pconnect.php

...for opening a permanent connection.

[[deleted]]

You don't have to close the connection after every query, you can open it once at the beginnen ald close it just before your script exits.

Be very carefull with pconnect, it will keep connections open even after your scripts have stopped. This means the total number of open connections increases dramatically and on a shared server it can easily overload the database server and cause the infamous 'too many connections' error.

Do not use it unless you know what you are doing!