I am working on rewriting a Perl-based website in PHP. The site is pretty much completely dynamic and includes a search engine, so it is quite database-intensive.
From what I've read the mysqli extensions are faster, but they also do not allow persistent connections. Which is better-- using mysqli but opening and closing the connection ~10 times for every page, or using persistent connections under the old mysql driver? The database is on the same server so it is using pipes to my knowledge, if that makes a difference.
I saw no noticeable difference in performance either way under testing, but it's hard to tell until I go live with the php version and it starts getting heavy traffic.
