Using Persistent Connections
The MySQL database extensions do not support persistent connections when used with the MySQL Client Library. However, they do when using MySQL Native Driver. When creating a connection the hostname is prepended with "p:". This is demonstrated by the following code snippet, which creates a new connection using mysqli:
<?php
$host = "p:localhost";
$port = 3306;
$socket = "/tmp/mysql.sock";
$user = "root";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "test";
$conn = new mysqli($host, $user, $password, $dbname, $port, $socket)
or die('Could not connect to the database server' . mysqli_connect_error());
?>