Re: [HACKERS] Simmultanous Connections (fwd)

At 11:46 AM 1/10/00 -0500, Karl DeBisschop wrote:

>Sounds like she may looking at postgres in PHP - at least PHP uses
>that temporary and permanant connection concept.  My experience is
>that PHP persistent connections are not worth it - the time to
>establish a new connection is pretty small, and stale connections can
>cause problems.

Boy, persistent connections in AOLserver sure help a lot (ask Lamar
Owen!).  If stale connections cause problems in your PHP environment,
then the PHP persistent connection implementation needs some work.

Forking a new backend is actually considerably more expensive then
just passing back the PID of an existing backend...

On Sun Solaris systems, forking is about 25 times as costly as 
starting up a new thread (according to data from Sun).  Of course,
returning an existing persistent db connection's even cheaper than
starting a new thread.  And that comparative cost will vary between
OS.

But not necessarily in a direction favoring more forking :)

I sent her a private note saying she really probably shouldn't be looking
at MySQL for her application, presumably having a real transaction-based
db is a Good Thing when maintaining a database of student grades.  Told
her she should be looking at various real RDBMS solutions and should leave
MySQL out of the picture entirely (while also telling her I thought PG
would work fine for her needs, of course).



- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com> Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest Rare Bird Alert
Serviceand other goodies at http://donb.photo.net.