Sean Coates has posted a new entry to his blog today looking at some of his past experiences in the PHP community (from php|architect to OmniTI and now Gimmie Bar) and how knowing people in the community helped him be in the "right place at the right time". Because of this, he recommends the PHP Community Conference as a way to get your own foot in the door and meet the wider community.

Nearly everyone I know and have had a long-term relationship with, in the PHP community, I met at a conference. Sure, I'd often "known" someone from their online persona, but it's hard to really "know" someone until you've spent some face time with them, preferably with a beer or two between you.

He points out that the PHP Community Conference is run by members of the PHP community and has been arranged as a great event to make those new connections (or renew old ones). The conference is happening April 21st and 22nd in Nashville, Tennessee and tickets are currently on sale.

The MySQL Performance Blog takes a look today at a more PHP-related topic - persistent connections in PHP and whether or not they are the devil (well, okay, so maybe not quest that bad - just a little evil).

The reason behind using persistent connections is of course reducing number of connects which are rather expensive, even though they are much faster with MySQL than with most other databases.

They go on to talk about:

• issues with the number of active connections that could come up
• the use of too many connections at once
• why persistent connections are disabled in the new mysqli extension

Their conclusion? Persistent connections are not evil. In fact, they're very good, when used in the right context and for the right kinds of queries. There's also a small push for an even newer MySQL driver for PHP by the MySQL team - the "mysqlnd" driver.

The Zend Developer Zone has information about a case study as performed by IBM and Zend showing the performance of the Zend Core for IBM (DB2 9) to services - you ready for this? - 10,000 active database connections.

The PHP application used for this study is a DVD store application that simulates users logging into an online catalog, browsing the catalog, and making DVD purchases.

The solution presented in this paper demonstrates how Zend Core for IBM with IBM DB2 9 performs, scales, and offers the best total cost of ownership. This is showcased by scaling-out Web servers as users to the online store increase. The single DB2 data server manages this without requiring the addition of CPU and memory using its unique connection concentrator feature, which manages and balances the workload on the data server. This solution is able to efficiently service tens of thousands of simultaneous connections to the database using this powerful feature.

They've included complete information on all of the testing and infrastructure they used to achieve this impressive feat. There's even graphs and images for those skimmers out there looking to glean what they can.