I'm using PEAR persistent database connection for connectiong to a databse from severel different pages, and everything seems to be working fine.
My question is: do I need/shold I close these connections before exiting a script? If yes, why is that, and how is it done?
From the manual:
mysql_pconnect() acts very much like mysql_connect() with two major differences.
First, when connecting, the function would first try to find a (persistent) link that's already open with the same host, username and password. If one is found, an identifier for it will be returned instead of opening a new connection.
Second, the connection to the SQL server will not be closed when the execution of the script ends. Instead, the link will remain open for future use (mysql_close() will not close links established by mysql_pconnect()).
You should use mysql_pconnect when you need to keep the connection "alive" for later use in the script/application. If you only need to connect once during the use/running of your script/application, you might as well use mysql_connect().