MySQL DB with many connections

[zbee]

I'm about to make an application on PHP, MySQL and Flex. There are going to be a lot of simultaneous connections to the DB (> 200). In Java I would make a connection pool or use for example Hibernate, and let that handle the DB concurrency, but what can I use for PHP and MySQL?

[kakki]

my2cents:
i used persistant connections to speed things up a little ...

maybe you can use the db-classes as singletons to prevent multiple connections
from a script ...

[zbee]

Yes, I'm going to use a Singleton to control the number of instances to connect to the DB, but is using mysql_pconnect enough for an application that is going to receive more than 200 simultaneous connections?