[dev] Reducing persistent database connections

[Jon Parise]

A large number of our applications now offer database backends.  A
cursory examination of the various SQL-based drivers indicates that we
almost always request a persistent database connection.  Even on a
moderately busy Horde site with only a handful of active applications,
this will result in a large number connections remaining open in the
persisted pool of database handles.

Connecting to databases (especially a MySQL database) has become a
very cheap operation (as others are realizing[1]), so the performance
gain of reusing an existing connection is no longer outweighing the
cost of dedicating resources to the connection pool.

I'd like to alter all of our applications to _not_ request persistent
connections and make it a rule that persistent connections only be
requested by the Horde Framework itself and not by applications (at
least in the default configuration).

Comments on this?

[1] http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_maintenance/60984.html

-- 
Jon Parise (jon at horde.org) :: The Horde Project (http://horde.org/)